Trump budget funds FBI ‘pre-crime’ center addressing ‘domestic terrorism’
The sci-fi movie Minority Report starring Tom Cruise tells the story of a dystopian future where a special “pre-crime” policing unit has been created in Washington D.C. to prevent crimes before they happen. Unfortunately for lovers of liberty, the recent budget request made by Donald Trump includes money to fund an FBI pre-crime center to identify and prosecute so-called domestic terrorism (i.e. anti-MAGA Americans).
Trump’s budget request to Congress contains the largest counterterrorism spending increase in years (via Ken Klippenstein):
The new center and funding boost represent the implementation of Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), the sweeping federal order I’ve been covering since it was signed last September.
Though public opposition to ICE succeeded at forcing the administration to back down in Minnesota — even firing both Kristi Noem and Gregory Bovino — the FBI is doubling down its domestic terrorism obsession.
Now, Trump’s budget request reveals, the FBI runs a dedicated “NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center”; with personnel from 10 federal agencies, it is busy “proactively” identifying domestic terrorists motivated by any of the following beliefs:
“anti-Americanism,”
“anti-capitalism,”
“anti-Christianity,”
“support for the overthrow of the U.S. Government,”
“extremism on migration,”
extremism on “race,”
extremism on “gender,”
“Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,”
Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on “religion,” and
Hostility towards those who hold traditional views on “morality.”
Free speech? We don’t need no stinkin’ free speech!
This isn’t Trump’s first foray into the “pre-crime” and “domestic terrorism” arena. In December 2025, I wrote a piece about a Department of Justice special funding program bribery scheme where he and Bondi would pay states to help the FBI round up “terrorists” guilty of nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights.
That program targeted people expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” as well as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti-Christianity.” Additionally, it instructed the FBI to establish “a cash reward system” for information leading to identification and arrest of leadership figures within these purported domestic terrorist organizations.
Minority Report-inspired legislation has been a priority for Trump and the Republican Party for quite some time. For instance, during the 2016 primary season, then-Representative Kevin McCarthy introduced a bill to create a “pre-crime” unit within the Department of Homeland Security. The Homeland Safety and Security Act (HR-5611) was intended “to prevent terrorists from launching attacks and obtaining passports, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES” (Emphasis mine).
“For other purposes” was thrown in there to leave the door wide open as to how the law could be applied in the future.
Two years later, following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, Republicans took another step in the direction of pre-crime law enforcement when they proposed a bill that I satirically called the Minority Report Act of 2018. This was a reintroduction of HR-5611 but included the creation of the Office for Partnerships to Prevent Terrorism — later known as the Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention.
Such laws could have quite literally been lifted from the script of the Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report. Here’s a recent real-life example from the state of Florida of what it looks like in practice (via J.D. Tuccille at Reason.com):
Predictive policing—a concept seemingly pulled straight from the 2002 popcorn flick Minority Report—has become increasingly hot with law enforcement agencies over the past decade. The field tempts budget-minded officeholders and cops alike with its science-y promise to forecast where crimes will occur in the future and who will commit them, targeting risk while minimizing wasted resources. But it also holds the potential to justify hassling people based on what a computer program and biases entered as data say they might someday do. That’s the basis of a recent lawsuit charging that a [Pasco County] Florida sheriff’s department has used predictive policing to harass the innocent.
“Predictive policing is the use of analytical techniques to identify promising targets for police intervention with the goal of preventing crime, solving past crimes, and identifying potential offenders and victims,” according to a 2013 RAND Corporation report. Even in those early days of the field, though, the report acknowledged that “[t]he very act of labeling areas and people as worthy of further law enforcement attention inherently raises concerns about civil liberties and privacy rights.” (Emphasis mine)
Most likely, this latest attack on the Constitution will come to us courtesy of a government partnership with Trump’s favorite “tech bro” Peter Theil, the CEO of Palantir. This partnership has been hard at work making pre-crime policing a reality going back to the days of Trump’s first term in office (via Wired.com):
Palantir had been selling its data storage, analysis, and collaboration software to police departments nationwide on the basis of rock-solid security. “Palantir Law Enforcement provides robust, built-in privacy and civil liberties protections, including granular access controls and advanced data retention capabilities,” its website reads.
The scale of Palantir’s implementation, the type, quantity and persistence of the data it processes, and the unprecedented access that many thousands of people have to that data all raise significant concerns about privacy, equity, racial justice, and civil rights. But until now, we haven’t known very much about how the system works, who is using it, and what their problems are. And neither Palantir nor many of the police departments that use it are willing to talk about it.
Palantir sells its technology to police forces on the basis that it breaks down silos, connects databases, and enables sharing between jurisdictions, saving everyone time and resources. The promise, however, comes with one big catch: You don’t get that benefit unless other agencies are also using Palantir. (Emphasis mine)
Technology that “breaks down silos” is exactly why Donald Trump has given Theil and Palantir the keys to the information kingdom. In fact, “eliminating information silos” was specifically mentioned in Trump’s March 2025 executive order as the way to allegedly stop “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Do you remember Elon Musk and DOGE? The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was allegedly formed to eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but the reality is that it was used as cover for Donald Trump’s true objective: build a technocratic dictatorship capable of completely destroying what little remains of liberty in America.
Musk promised to produce $2 trillion in budget cuts, but in the end, he failed. He succeeded, however, to expand Donald Trump’s technocratic dictatorship by vastly expanding government’s domestic surveillance capabilities and building a “master database” containing the personal data of Americans held by numerous federal agencies, including the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and the Department of Health and Human Services.
One of the recipients of this massive collection of personal data was none other than Palantir, a company specifically chosen by Trump to surveil Americans (via NewsMax.com):
The New York Times reported that Palantir, the AI-focused software and military contractor, has expanded its “work across the federal government in recent months” after it had been tapped by President Donald Trump to create “detailed portraits” or a digital ID on Americans “which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies,” such as from the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Health and Human Services Department, the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education.
Palantir employees told The Times that the company’s engineers had been “quietly” discussing creating a digital ID for Americans and that they had grown worried about placing such sensitive data in one place. Anonymous government officials also told The Times that Palantir’s pick to create a program compiling data on Americans “was driven by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.” (Emphasis mine)
Government’s partnership with Palantir has positioned the tech giant to run 27 government agencies . . . and counting:
Allowing the FBI to use pre-crime technology to address so-called domestic terrorism not only violates our First Amendment protections, it also violates the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of knowing who your accusers are and the nature of the charges and evidence being brought against you, and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ guarantee of due-process and equal-protection rights protecting us against the arbitrary or irrational actions of government.
Pre-crime law enforcement makes a good story line for a sci-fi movie, but it’s a terrible idea in the real world because it will inevitably destroy our Republic . . . and that’s a crime that doesn’t require a Precog to predict.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.
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