There Is Now a $166 Million FBI Budget Line for Trans People Like Me
What NSPM-7 actually says, what the FY2027 FBI budget actually funds, and why I am writing this from South Dakota.
Read this slowly. I had to.
On September 25, 2025, the President of the United States signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. On April 4, 2026, his administration sent Congress a fiscal year 2027 budget request that included a $166 million line item to fund a new FBI center. The directive names the categories of people the federal government will now treat as possible domestic terrorists. Among them is what the document calls “extremism on gender.”
That phrase has not been defined. The budget that funds it has not yet been approved. Both of those facts matter, and I will get to them.
First, the document. Read what it actually says, before I tell you what I think.
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What the memorandum actually says
NSPM-7 is titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence. It was signed three days after a separate executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. The operative passage reads:
Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
That is the federal government, on the official White House website, naming the views it will now treat as warning signs of domestic terrorism. Anti-Christianity. Extremism on gender. Hostility toward those who hold traditional American views.
None of those phrases is defined.
Hina Shamsi at the ACLU called the memorandum “a fever dream of conspiracies, outright falsehoods, and the president’s distorted equation of criticism of his policies by real or perceived political opponents with criminal and terroristic conspiracies.” She pointed out something the document does not contain. NSPM-7 does not mention the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. It does not mention the Whitmer kidnapping plot. It does not mention any of the actual mass-casualty political violence in recent American memory. It mentions “anti-Christianity.” It mentions “extremism on gender.”
The Brennan Center for Justice reached the same conclusion in its analysis. The orders, Brennan wrote, could target “everyone from labor organizers, socialists, many libertarians, those who criticize Christianity, pro-immigration groups, anti-ICE protestors, and racial justice and transgender activists, to anyone who holds views that the administration considers to be ‘anti-American.’” Brennan further documented that the president has no statutory authority to designate domestic terrorist organizations and that the incidents the memorandum cites do not meet any coherent definition of a coordinated terror campaign.
On December 4, 2025, Attorney General Pamela Bondi issued an implementing memorandum telling federal prosecutors and the FBI to treat NSPM-7 as operational guidance, to compile lists of “domestic terrorism” organizations, and to refer flagged matters to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces for, in her words, “the exhaustive investigation contemplated by NSPM-7.”
This is no longer rhetoric. This is a workflow.
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The $166 million ask
Workflow needs funding. The administration submitted its fiscal year 2027 budget request to Congress on April 4, 2026. The request asks for $2.16 trillion in discretionary authority, a 15.3% increase over the prior year’s proposal. The FBI is slated to receive $12.5 billion for salaries and expenses, a $1.9 billion increase.
Inside that allocation is a brand-new line item. The Department of Justice asks for $166 million to fund what the document calls the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center. The budget request describes it as a multi-agency unit staffed by personnel from ten federal agencies whose job is to “integrate intelligence, operational support, and financial analysis to proactively identify networks and prosecute domestic terrorist and related criminal actors.”
Read that phrase again. Proactively identify.
Identify based on what? On the criteria, NSPM-7 is listed. The budget request reproduces them word for word in appropriations language:
Commonly, their violent conduct relates to views associated with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the U.S. Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
The budget request itself tells you how the JMC will find such people. It will surveil “popular social media platforms, smaller websites with targeted audiences, and encrypted chat applications.” It will look for people “recruiting new adherents, planning and rallying support for in-person actions, and disseminating materials encouraging radicalization and mobilization to violence.”
The line from a presidential directive that names “extremism on gender” as a terrorism indicator to an FBI budget line that funds proactive surveillance of people opposed to “traditional American views” is unbroken. There is no missing step.
Congress has until October 1, 2026, to approve or reject the request. That is the political fact that matters most in this whole piece, and I will return to it.
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