30 years after a vet bombed Oklahoma City, military service remains the ‘single strongest predictor’ of involvement in violent extremism, experts say.
Remembering Oklahoma City bombing: What happened on April 19, 1995
Archival footage from Oklahoma City Bombing April 19, 1995 shows sequence of events and Bill Clinton delivering 20 year anniversary address.
Thirty years ago, a former Army soldier committed the worst act of domestic terrorism in this country’s history: The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people. In the three decades since, dozens of terror plots – some successful, many foiled – have been committed and planned by veterans and active duty members of the United States military.
Military service remains the “single strongest predictor” of involvement in violent extremism, according to terrorism researchers. And when it became clear that hundreds of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists had connections to the armed forces, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced sweeping plans to identify and remove extremists from military ranks and help ensure veterans don’t fall down the slippery slope to violent domestic extremism.
That effort was already sputtering by 2023, when Austin still helmed the Pentagon, USA TODAY found in an investigation that year. Today, the Department of Defense is led by Pete Hegseth, who was himself once removed from a National Guard posting for suspected ties to extremism. Hegseth, like his appointer, President Donald Trump, has long cast scorn on the very notion that military members are prone to becoming domestic extremists. Hegseth has called efforts to combat domestic extremism in the ranks a “purge,” writing that they distract military leaders from their primary role.
“Things like focusing on extremism have created a climate inside our ranks that feel political when it hasn’t ever been political,” Hegseth said during his Senate confimation hearing, according to NPR. “Those are the types of things that are going to change.”
USA TODAY has found that Trump’s cuts to the federal bureaucracy this year have targeted programs that once trained military personnel to spot and quell extremist ideologies in service members. Austin’s effort, according to researchers who monitor extremism, has all but disappeared. Key figures have left government posts where they were enacting those reforms, and federal funding for rooting out extremism has evaporated. That has crippled programs to help officers and veterans’ organizations identify potential terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing against a government he believed had overreached.
And as the Pentagon appears to have abandoned the effort to combat violent domestic extremism, researchers and veterans groups warn that the risk of another attack like Oklahoma City from a disgruntled veteran is higher than it has been for decades.
Thousands of veterans who once worked for the federal government have been dismissed by Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, according to estimates by congressional Democrats. Potentially millions more veterans and service members have been exposed to turmoil in their life savings as Trump’s fluctuating trade policies roil markets.
Many supporters of Trump within the military feel abandoned and cheated, said Joe Plenzler, a Marine Corps veteran and board member of the nonprofit organization We The Veterans. Meanwhile, he said, the president’s opponents have been given more reasons to radicalize and possibly slip into extremism.
“You’ve got a pretty significant cohort of people who have trained in the military, and are familiar with weapons and explosives and organizing operations being maligned by their government for their patriotic service,” Plenzler said. “Veterans have a bias for action, so when they’re pissed off, they have a motivation to do something about it.”
The Department of Defense did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
In 2023, in response to USA TODAY’s findings, then-Cmdr. Nicole Schwegman, a Defense department spokesperson, said in a written response: “The vast majority of Service members serve with honor and integrity and do not participate in extremist activities.”
That’s echoed by extremism researchers, who stress that among the tens of millions of Americans who serve, only a tiny fraction go on to get involved in domestic violent extremism.
An anti-extremism effort seemingly abandoned
Austin’s announcement in April 2021 that he planned to tackle the issue of domestic extremism in the military was vaunted by extremism researchers and veterans groups alike.
Studies by the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, have shown that having a military background is the “single strongest predictor” of violent extremism in America.
But by the summer of 2023, an extensive USA TODAY investigation found the reforms envisioned by a working group convened by Austin to study the issue had largely fallen by the wayside. Of 20 proposed solutions, the military could provide evidence that only two had been fully enacted.
Meanwhile, the drumbeat of extremist attacks committed by current and former military service people continued: An Army reservist committed the worst mass shooting in Maine’s history in 2023. And on New Year’s Day this year, two separate attacks were carried out by an Army veteran and an active-duty Green Beret.
Four months after Trump’s inauguration, it’s unclear whether any of the proposed reforms continue to progress within the military. The DOD did not respond to emails requesting information. But insiders and observers of the effort say they have largely given up hope that anything is happening, given Trump and Hegseth’s stated views on the connection between the military and domestic extremism.
“There’s this countervailing wind going in the opposite direction, in the form of anti-DEI, anti-woke, anti-anything that ‘distracts you’ from more fighting,” said Bill Braniff, executive director of The Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University.
Braniff, who took a position at the Department of Homeland Security two years ago, partly to assist with shepherding anti-extremism reforms, resigned in protest earlier this year after his department was decimated by Trump’s changes. He said it’s unclear in the maelstrom of Washington what remains of the effort, but said he’s highly skeptical any progress is being made.
Michael Jensen, the principal investigator at START studying the connection between the armed forces and terrorism, said he conducted his last training for the military last October.
He hasn’t been invited back.
“I have no idea if there will be training moving forward that will have sessions dedicated to domestic extremism,” Jensen said. “I would be shocked to hear the top leadership in the DOD still cares about this issue and is still trying to promote a culture of anti-extremism within the military – that would just be mind-blowing to me, given that everything they have said since they came into power has been quite the opposite.”
As prevention sputters out, risk of domestic extremism rises
McVeigh committed his atrocity 30 years ago out of anger and disgust at the federal government for its actions during the Waco, Texas, siege in 1993 and the standoff at Ruby Ridge in Idaho in 1992. Retaliation against what they view as an overbearing or tyrannical federal government has been a powerful motivator for domestic terrorists – both military and non-military affiliated – since the dawn of the republic, said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
“In U.S. history, there has always been a dislike of federal authority and battles over what the federal government should be – we’ve had many rebellions, and you can draw a straight line from the Civil War all the way up to Jan. 6,” Beirich said. “These repeated attacks target the federal government as being inherently evil and anti-American. It’s a pattern that has gone on and on and on, and we don’t seem to have learned any lessons.”
This year brings its own motivating issues in this regard, Plenzler and other experts say.
For months now, Trump, Musk and others have set about an unprecedented transformation effort within the federal bureaucracy. That has included tens of thousands of layoffs, the effective dismantling of the entire United States foreign aid system and turmoil at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Plenzler said the cuts have hit the veteran community particularly hard. Approximately 1 in 3 federal employees is a veteran of the armed forces, and that proportion is much higher at the Department of Veterans Affairs, he said.
Plenzler said veterans, including those who voted for Trump, have found themselves suddenly unemployed after assuming they once had a job for life. He expects a backlash against the Trump administration that he likens to the Shays’ Rebellion, an uprising in Massachusetts in 1786 led by a former captain in the Continental Army:
“It was the first time they had to call out the militia to put down a veteran riot because they promised veterans payment in coins but gave them paper money, then they demanded taxes in coins,” Plenzler said. “So the veterans just took over all the debtors’ courts in Massachusetts and shut them down.”
Veterans and acting service members are among the tens of millions of Americans who are experiencing economic turmoil that most analysts and economists place squarely on Trump’s shoulders, blaming it on his tariffs on foreign imports.
Speaking with USA TODAY in early April, Braniff considered how that economic stress might lead to domestic extremism:
“People just lost their entire retirement in two weeks, and maybe their job and their career, or maybe their industry,” he said. “And, you know, the ideas don’t change so much, and the time is right for them to mobilize violence.”
Plenzler, Braniff and others pointed out that Americans are already committing acts of vandalism and property violence – acts the Trump administration has deemed to be domestic terrorism – aimed at Musk, the architect of the massive DOGE cuts and the CEO of Tesla Motors.
Cases of vandalism against Tesla dealerships and against individual Tesla vehicles have shot up in recent weeks, leading the FBI and DHS (who don’t echo Trump’s terrorism claim) to warn of “escalating threats and activism targeting Tesla.”
“I think we’re already seeing the early sparks of the Boston Tea Party,” Plenzler said. “The protest season in America is a lot like the fighting season in Afghanistan: Once it starts to warm up and people are willing to stand outside all day long, you’ll see more of it.“
Could we see another bombing like Oklahoma City?
Experts on domestic terrorism are quick to point out that it’s almost impossible to predict who the next domestic terrorist is, when they will strike, or who they will target.
In today’s polarized political climate, there are always disgruntled groups of people, and within those groups, there are individuals who might be motivated towards violence, said Jensen, the terrorism researcher.
But history – both distant and recent – shows that Americans who have served in the military are statistically more likely than civilians to engage in violent acts towards the federal government. Oklahoma City was the most deadly example of this violence, but it was by no means an isolated attack.
By never implementing, or by dismantling, the very programs designed to spot McVeighs in the making, at the same time thousands of former soldiers are being dismissed by the federal government, the Trump administration is gambling with American lives, Plenzler said.
“When people go into fight-or-flight mode, their prefrontal cortex shuts down – the part of the brain that does the reasoning, the part that puts the brakes on action and causes you to think twice – and when you’re in that survival mode, you don’t act rationally, you lack emotionality,” he said. “I think the more that they (the Trump administration) cause uncertainty, which is the greatest driver of amygdala fight-or-flight response, it contributes to putting more kindling in a big pile, and it’s just waiting for a spark.”
Will Carless covers extremism and emerging issues nationwide for USA TODAY.