National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard on Wednesday exposed the Biden administration’s plan to potentially violate people’s rights under the guise of preventing domestic terrorism.
Gabbard, in a post on X, announced that she had declassified a document containing the Biden-era “Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism.”
As promised, I have declassified the Biden Administration’s Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism.
— DNI Tulsi Gabbard (@DNIGabbard) April 16, 2025
Read it here: https://t.co/VAXDHkgZTK https://t.co/oNXjKDqamc pic.twitter.com/p9co00Scge
On the surface, the plan appears aimed at protecting public safety by preventing the radicalization of potential domestic terrorists while ensuring they are not able to carry out violent attacks.
The document lays out a comprehensive interagency framework for identifying, preventing, and disrupting potential threats coming from domestic violent extremists. It was meant to provide a roadmap for federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial agencies to collaborate to address immediate threats while dealing with the root causes of domestic terrorism.
However, the strategic implementation plan’s (SIP) guidelines appear to do more than simply combat domestic terrorism; they also empower government agencies to potentially violate people’s rights.
For starters, some of the instructions could violate the First Amendment, especially when it comes to free speech and assembly. The SIP emphasizes the need to counter the proliferation of “DT (domestic terrorism)-related content” on the Internet. It suggests an expansive effort to monitor, report, and censor speech that is deemed extremist by working with Big Tech platforms.
This practice came to light shortly after Elon Musk bought Twitter – now X. The Twitter Files revealed extensive government efforts to silence dissenting views on the COVID-19 pandemic, elections, and other matters. But this report suggests the state was also doing the same with those it labeled as potential domestic terrorists.
It instructed agencies to “Share with relevant technology and other private-industry companies… relevant information on DT-related and associated transnational terrorist online content.”
The SIP also proposed expanding federal watchlists such as the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB) and the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) to include people who do not have international connections. “TIDE and the TSDB include a greater number of known and suspected terrorists that are motivated by a variety of ideologies,” the document read.
Those included in these databases can be subject to travel restrictions, investigations, and other negative consequences without judicial oversight or due process. It essentially enables agencies to conduct surveillance based on mere suspicion instead of hard evidence.
The SIP urges agencies to “consider updated” federal personnel background check forms to identify folks who might be linked to domestic terrorism. It means they are flagged not for committing a crime, but because of their political ideology, personal belief, group membership, or other factors. Given that this document was aimed to facilitating collaboration between government agencies, this practice could result in mass surveillance on Americans without warrants or judicial proceedings.
As if this weren’t bad enough, the plan also violates the right to keep and bear arms, which was a top priority for the Biden administration. It promoted a preventative policing model that emphasized red flag laws, mental health interventions, and behavioral threat assessments. The administration wished to enhance its ability to confiscate firearms without due process.
The plan sought to limit access to what it called “lethal means,” which is just a fancy way to say “we need to stop people from getting guns.” It calls for the federal government to “rein in the proliferation of ‘ghost guns,’ encourage state adoption of extreme risk protection orders; and drive other executive and legislative action, including banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
This is a standard method anti-gunners propose to crack down on gun ownership; just pretend you’re trying to stop potential terrorists by preventing non-terrorists from owning firearms. Biden and his anti-gunner cronies seek to link gun ownership – especially private and unregistered firearms – to domestic terrorism.
If this effort would have succeeded, and Democrats won another term in the White House, there can be no doubt they would have tried pushing legislation curtailing gun ownership using the supposed threat of domestic terrorism.
The strategy could also have violated states’ rights. It recommends exploring “options to engage with states on using laws that already exist in all fifty states prohibiting certain private paramilitary activity.”
The Biden administration wanted to pressure states to adopt “extreme risk protection orders” and “Drive other executive and legislative action, including banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
The former president likely would have employed a carrot-and-stick approach to compelling state governments to adopt anti-gun and anti-due process policies to aid with its supposed efforts to root out domestic extremism.
While this document was classified, it is clear that the Biden administration pursued each of these initiatives during the former president’s tenure. In 2021, it used these guidelines in its National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report suggesting that the agencies mentioned in the SIP took steps to implement most of its instructions.
This means there could be countless numbers of American citizens whose rights have been violated as the government pretended to combat domestic terrorism.
These initiatives always sound innocent. But under the veil are policies that expand the government’s power to intrude in our lives – typically through the strategic use of fearmongering. The same happened under George W. Bush’s administration with the Patriot Act. The reality is that these programs will only continue as long as we have people in office who disregard the Constitution and the rights it is supposed to protect.
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