Since Donald Trump returned to office nine months ago, his administration has launched high-profile investigations of universities that he believes were too slow to crack down on pro-Palestine protesters.
The latest probe of a college, however, is not coming from the White House — and it has won surprising support from Arab and Muslim groups who allege that university researchers may have contributed to government surveillance.
The investigation led by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., takes aim at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, a decade-old project in the nation’s capital that has given an academic stamp to the effort to uncover the alleged jihadists and domestic extremists in our midst.
The program’s staffers make frequent guest appearances on cable television to opine on subjects ranging from the rise of antisemitism after the Hamas-led October 7 attacks on Israel to the threat of right-wing extremists in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot.
“If the TSA used that group’s reports as the only ‘evidence,’ it’s a scandal.”
Paul announced an investigation of the program at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee last month on the Transportation Security Administration’s “Quiet Skies” watchlist program. He alleged that the George Washington program’s employees may have had an unduly close relationship with the Department of Homeland Security, TSA’s parent agency.
Advocacy groups working on issues that affect Arab and Muslim communities — frequent targets of government watchlisting efforts since the September 11 attacks — welcomed Paul’s investigation of the George Washington program.
“This week’s hearing confirmed what millions suspected: Washington insiders weaponized the watchlist system against law-abiding Americans,” the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the Muslim Public Affairs Council said in a joint press release shortly after the hearing. “If the TSA used that group’s reports as the only ‘evidence,’ it’s a scandal.”
Internal records suggest the government relied on Program on Extremism research to add names to TSA watchlists, Paul said. (The university’s press office did not respond to a request for comment.)
Paul is exploring how TSA got the information. He told The Intercept that his committee has asked George Washington for records that would help determine whether its researchers were actively involved in nominating travelers for surveillance.
“We do think that what was going on is that things that would be unseemly for government, they were farming out a little bit,” Paul said.
Paul’s concerns at the September 30 hearing focused primarily on TSA’s watchlisting of conservatives such as Tulsi Gabbard, the Democrat-turned-MAGA diehard who was trailed by federal air marshals last year, and people suspected of association with the January 6 riot.
“What was going on is that things that would be unseemly for government.”
In some cases, Paul alleged, people were trailed simply because they traveled to Washington to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally preceding the riot. One woman added to a TSA watchlist, the wife of a federal air marshal, testified at the hearing that she never approached the Capitol grounds.
George Washington’s program has published a publicly available database of January 6 defendants, but Paul said he wants to learn whether TSA relied on non-public information.
Paul said he was particularly concerned that the George Washington program had received funding from the federal government. The program was a founding member of a 2020 counterterrorism consortium funded by a 10-year, $36 million Department of Homeland Security grant to “work closely with the department’s operational units to generate research and educate current and future homeland security leaders on the latest methods of counterterrorism,” according to a university press release.
Usual Suspects
If protesters who supported Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results do not make for universally sympathetic victims, Arab and Muslim American groups also say there is ample reason to be concerned about the TSA’s watchlisting practices.
For more than two decades, Arab and Muslim Americans have complained about the opaque process by which names are added and removed to government watchlists, which sometimes appears to be triggered by where people have traveled and with whom, rather than anything they have done.
Abed Ayoub, the national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said at Paul’s hearing that he sympathized with the experience of right-wing activists.
“What they are feeling today mirrors what Arab and Muslim families have endured for decades: a secret designation that follows you from airport to employer to consulate, with no clear explanation and no reliable fix,” he said. “That is not a partisan problem; it is a due-process problem.”
Paul’s investigation is only the latest episode to put a spotlight on the program and its director, Lorenzo Vidino, whose research focuses on the Muslim Brotherhood and has been accused by the Council on American–Islamic Relations of “collaboration with anti-Muslim racists.”
Last year, another academic, the Islamophobia scholar Farid Hafez, filed a racketeering lawsuit alleging that Vidino was the source of a smear campaign that unfairly tarnished his reputation in his native Austria. Vidino was paid for rumors on “new targets” associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe by a private investigation firm in Switzerland, which in turn was funded by the United Arab Emirates to attack its enemies, the lawsuit claimed.
A federal judge last month dismissed the lawsuit, finding that she had no jurisdiction over allegations about events that transpired in Europe.
The George Washington University program is not the only so-called counter-extremism project that has come under fire with the changing of the political winds. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has also canceled grants doled out by her agency’s Center for Prevention Partnerships and Programs for initiatives, such as the Eradicate Hate Global Summit and the One World Strong program, which was founded by survivors of the Boston Marathon bombing.
The university counterterrorism consortium that included George Washington also saw DHS funding terminated before a Republican lawmaker intervened to convince Noem to pause the cancellation, Nextgov/FCW reported in April.
Watching the Watchlists
In June, Noem announced that she was ending the Quiet Skies watchlist that once included Gabbard, who now serves as the director of national intelligence.
Noem said that cancellation was the result of an internal investigation. The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to questions about who conducted the investigation, or requests for any reports that it produced.
Noem and Paul are far from the first officials to call for reforms to the watchlisting system, which spans multiple agencies and includes hundreds of thousands of names in different databases. Democrats and left-leaning civil liberties groups have long been the most outspoken voices calling for change.
Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, the ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, issued a report in 2023 calling for reforms that was motivated by the experiences of Arab and Muslim constituents in his state.
In January, a special government body known as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board called for revamping the government’s main terrorist watchlist to make it easier for Americans to find out whether they are on it and to dispute their placement on it.
Trump effectively disbanded the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board in January by firing two of its Democratic members. He has also forced out inspectors general across the government who are responsible for internal oversight and dramatically downsized a Homeland Security office that investigated civil liberties complaints.
Peters said at the watchlist hearing chaired by Paul that internal oversight had been “gutted, eliminating one of the few checks and balances that Americans can use to protect their rights.”
