IT'S WHY THEY SUPPORTED PRESIDENT BANNON:

Experts in the field believe that withholding the funds is part of a broader policy of the Trump administration to redefine violent extremism and reshape government policy for dealing with the problem, focusing exclusively on violent Islamic extremism while eliminating programs aimed at violent white nationalists.

"Their people talk about terrorism only in the context of Islamic extremism," said Heidi Beirich, director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. "It seems pretty clear that Trump doesn't care about other types of extremism."

But existing data on violent extremism in the U.S. does not support the Trump administration's narrow approach to the problem.

An analysis prepared by START, a national consortium for the study of terrorism, supported by the Department of Homeland Security and based at the University of Maryland, looked at Islamist and far-right homicides in the U.S. in the past 15 years. The study excluded two outliers - the 9/11 terror attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing, and found that far-right extremists have killed more than double the people than Islamist extremists - 272 compared to 130. "To focus solely on Islamist extremism is to ignore the murders perpetrated by the extreme far right and their place in a constantly changing threat environment," concluded a February 2017 research paper compiled by scholars affiliated with START.

"It's probably short-sighted to only focus on Islamist extremists," said Peter Weinberger who heads the counter violent extremism program at START. He noted that not only do the numbers show the danger of far-right extremism, but also that dealing with extremists from the right could provide tools and information to help counter Islamist extremism.

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