It recruited community leaders, teachers, social workers, and public health providers to help the government in identifying people "at risk" of becoming violent extremists.
CVE was criticized for employing flawed indicators of extremism such as mistrust of law enforcement or feelings of alienation and for using religion as part of its metrics targeting Muslims.
[1][2] In April 2017, the Government Accountability Office published a critical report evaluating federal CVE efforts that stated, “The federal government does not have a cohesive strategy or process for assessing the overall CVE effort.” Also, its investigators could not “determine if the United States is better off today than it was in 2011 as a result of these tasks.”[3] In December 2016, the incoming Trump presidential transition team planned to stop the program from targeting white supremacists, which have committed bombings and shootings such as at a black church in Charleston.
Congressional Republicans criticized CVE for being politically correct and argued that using the term "Radical Islam" would prevent violent attacks.
[15][16][17] In August 2017, reacting to reports that the Trump administration rescinded a grant to an organization fighting against neo-Nazism, the Southern Poverty Law Center warned that the threat of domestic terrorism from white supremacists remained high, pointing to an attack in Portland that happened in May.