NCITE

The National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center, known as NCITE, is a research consortium based at the University of Nebraska Omaha and designated by the Department of Homeland Security as its Center of Excellence for terrorism prevention and counterterrorism research. The center is funded through a ten-year cooperative agreement announced in 2020 and a basic ordering agreement signed in 2021, and the university also holds separate DHS grants for prevention and threat assessment projects.

Selection of the University of Nebraska Omaha

On February 24, 2020, the DHS Science and Technology Directorate announced that the University of Nebraska Omaha would lead a consortium for a new Center of Excellence for Terrorism Prevention and Counterterrorism Research. The directorate stated that it would provide a grant of 3.65 million dollars for the first operating year of a ten-year grant period. William N. Bryan, then the senior official performing the duties of the Under Secretary for Science and Technology, was quoted in the release.¹ The university's release of the same day described a "10-year, $36 million grant" from the Office of University Programs, the largest single grant in the university's 112-year history, and a consortium of 17 partner institutions "stretching from Maine to Florida to Southern California." It named the center the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center of Excellence, quoted the University of Nebraska system president Ted Carter and the Omaha chancellor Jeffrey P. Gold, and quoted Nebraska's governor, Pete Ricketts, who thanked the university "for its successful effort to bring such an ambitious project to fruition." Representative Don Bacon was also quoted.² The center and the university later gave the figure as 36.5 million dollars over ten years.³

The release named Gina Ligon as principal investigator. It described her as holding the Jack and Stephanie Koraleski Chair for Collaboration Science in the College of Business Administration, and listed her earlier work as "collecting data on terrorist group leaders and their business operations for the Department of Defense" and "co-developing a professional training program for civilian leaders from USSTRATCOM for the National Strategic Research Institute (NSRI)." Douglas Derrick was to lead the innovation and transition portfolio. The center was to occupy Mammel Hall, where work had begun on what the release called a "privately-funded, $17 million, 44,000 square-foot addition."²

A 2022 article in the University of Nebraska Foundation magazine reported that the university was selected from about 75 institutions that submitted letters of interest, after a site visit by DHS officials, and that the center occupied a new wing of the Omaha business school. Ligon, an organizational psychologist, was quoted saying that the university was "the trusted agent, the academic partner of the Department of Homeland Security for all counterterrorism research."³ NCITE's 2023 announcements described more than 60 academics at 26 institutions, and a partnership with the National Strategic Research Institute, a Department of Defense university affiliated research center of the University of Nebraska. NCITE stated that Omaha was the only university with both a DHS Center of Excellence and access to such a research center.⁴

Basic ordering agreement and task orders

On March 10, 2021, the DHS Office of Procurement Operations entered basic ordering agreement 70RSAT21G00000002 with the University of Nebraska. The award description states that its purpose was "to initiate Phase V of OUP's 2 new Basic Ordering Agreements (BOAs) for a 5-year period, 1 BOA each to: CBTS / Texas A&M University and NCITE / University of Nebraska Omaha." The record gives a period from March 10, 2021 to March 9, 2026, a single-award structure, the Office of the Under Secretary for Science and Technology as funding agency, and a ceiling of 45,000,000 dollars, last modified on May 13, 2025. Obligations are recorded on the task orders and not on the agreement.⁵

NCITE announced on April 18, 2023 that the ceiling had been raised to 35 million dollars from 10 million, and that the original ceiling had been 5 million. Dana Saft, the program manager at the Office of University Programs, was quoted in the announcement. The same release stated that other agencies could direct funding through the vehicle.⁴

The federal spending database lists eleven task orders to the University of Nebraska under the agreement between September 2021 and September 2025, with the following award amounts and periods of performance.⁶

• 70RSAT21FR0000084, 5,611,667.42 dollars, September 29, 2021 to March 18, 2025.
• 70RSAT22FR0000050, 997,092 dollars, September 27, 2022 to May 31, 2024, for a workshop and report on terrorist use of explosives.
• 70RSAT22FR0000108, 8,712,585 dollars, September 30, 2022 to March 17, 2025, described as "CP3 Grant Program Evaluations."
• 70RSAT23FR0000024, 1,622,181 dollars, June 12, 2023 to March 17, 2025.
• 70RSAT23FR0000046, 10,024 dollars, May 8 to June 7, 2023, described as "Metaverse Experience - Terrorist Adoption of Emerging Technology."
• 70RSAT23FR0000114, 748,618 dollars, September 14, 2023 to March 13, 2026.
• 70RSAT23FR0000115, 839,677.85 dollars, September 19, 2023 to March 18, 2025, for support to National Threat Evaluation and Reporting.
• 70RSAT24FR0000054, 195,628 dollars, July 24, 2024 to December 31, 2025, for a fusion center threat assessment using suspicious activity reporting.
• 70RSAT24FR0000098, 1,267,870 dollars, September 30, 2024 to July 8, 2025, for a soft target risk assessment.
• 70RSAT25FR0000046, 970,300 dollars with a ceiling of 1,498,249 dollars, September 29, 2025 to March 9, 2027, titled "Research on Emerging Activity of Criminal and Terrorist Groups (REACT)."
• 70RSAT25FR0000047, 1,849,416 dollars, September 29, 2025 to March 9, 2027, titled "Disrupting Cartels."

A twelfth order, 70RSAT26FR0000072, titled "Countering Nihilistic Violent Extremist (NVE) Threats," is listed at 1,838,383 dollars from September 30, 2026 to March 29, 2028 under a new basic ordering agreement, 70RSAT26G00000003, dated July 15, 2026.⁶

Evaluation of DHS prevention grants

DHS administers the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program through its Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. NCITE announced in April 2023 a three-year project of 4.5 million dollars, led by Matt Allen, to evaluate the program, with partners at RTI International and the Public Policy Center of the University of Nebraska.⁴ The NCITE report states that the Science and Technology Directorate asked the center to evaluate the program, and that its outcome evaluation used data from recipients in fiscal years 2016, 2020, 2021 and 2022. A second DHS program, Invent2Prevent, was evaluated by the University of Nebraska Public Policy Center. The NCITE project page lists Sarah Cook, director of the security and extremism research program of RTI International, on the research team.⁷⁸

The DHS announcement of the fiscal year 2021 grants lists a grant of 715,102 dollars to "University of Nebraska, Omaha, NCITE" for a project on tips reporting, combining tips data from Sarpy County, Nebraska with focus groups and laboratory studies and building a chatbot for reporting.⁹ The federal spending database records the corresponding award, EMW-2021-GR-00072, at 683,920.86 dollars with a start date of October 1, 2021.¹⁰ Separately, the Science and Technology Directorate paid RTI International to evaluate five fiscal year 2021 grantees, among them the Middlebury Institute CTEC; RTI's profile of that grant was posted by DHS on January 27, 2025.¹¹ The same grant program funded the Middlebury center in fiscal years 2021 and 2022.⁹

The DHS task order titled "CP3 Grant Program Evaluations" is recorded at 8,712,585 dollars, and the NCITE announcement of the evaluation project gave 4.5 million dollars.⁴⁶

Termination notice of April 2025

Nextgov reported on April 8, 2025 that DHS had halted funding to all grants and cooperative agreements in the Science and Technology Directorate, citing a memo titled "Termination of the Centers of Excellence" signed by Acting Under Secretary Julie Brewer and sent to Secretary Kristi Noem, and citing two people familiar with the matter for the approval. A memo of March 4, 2025 listed new priority mission areas for the directorate, one of them "Counter Transnational Criminal Organizations and Other Illicit Actors."¹²

On April 25, 2025 Nextgov reported that the termination of NCITE had been paused after discussions between Senator Pete Ricketts and Noem. The University of Nebraska Omaha stated that it received a notification of award termination on April 8 and that DHS notified it a day later that the termination was paused. Ricketts told Nextgov that a main focus of NCITE was research on cartel activity, border security and related terrorism, and said at a town hall in Scottsbluff, Nebraska that Noem had told him, "I will keep [NCITE] funded through the fiscal year." The Alaska center ADAC-ARCTIC at the University of Alaska Anchorage was the other center reported as paused.¹³

Four of the task orders above carry end dates of March 17 or 18, 2025 in the federal spending database: 70RSAT21FR0000084, 70RSAT22FR0000108, 70RSAT23FR0000024 and 70RSAT23FR0000115.⁶ The two task orders beginning September 29, 2025 are titled "Disrupting Cartels" and "Research on Emerging Activity of Criminal and Terrorist Groups."⁶ NCITE's 2026 announcement stated that Ricketts "played an integral role in keeping the UNO-based Center and its research federally funded in 2025."¹⁴

A fact sheet of the Science and Technology Directorate dated March 2025 describes NCITE as a consortium with more than 40 university and industry partners, lists the George Washington University among its university partners, and lists as DHS alignment U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the Transportation Security Administration, the United States Coast Guard, the United States Secret Service, the State of Nebraska, Douglas County and Sarpy County.¹⁵ On June 10, 2025, two months after the termination notice, Ligon submitted written testimony to a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs chaired by James Lankford on threats to the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. The testimony lists "newly designated cartel terrorist organizations" among likely threat actors, refers to the State Department designation of ten cartels and transnational criminal organizations as foreign terrorist organizations, and asks the subcommittee to consider "restoring and protecting funding for the nine DHS Centers of Academic Excellence."¹⁶

Prosecution research and the 764 report

Seamus Hughes, who had been deputy director of the GWU Program on Extremism from its founding in 2015, is a senior research faculty member and policy associate at NCITE. The NCITE biography lists a 2023 NCITE report with Pete Simi on threats to public officials and describes his earlier service at the National Counterterrorism Center and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.¹⁷¹⁸¹⁹ The 2015 newsletter of the Program on Extremism, obtained from DHS in a records release, stated that Hughes had been named to the Homeland Security Advisory Council of the DHS Secretary.²⁰

NCITE's report "Prosecuting Nihilistic Violent Extremism: An Examination of Federal and State Charges Against 764 and Related Networks," dated December 20, 2025, names Hughes as principal investigator of the prosecuting threat actors team with Mackenzie Harms, and Bettina Rottweiler, Caitlin Clemmow and Austin Doctor as leads of the youth mobilization team. It states that it is based on work supported by DHS under grant award number 20STTPC00001-06. The report describes 764 Network as founded in January 2021 by a teenager in Texas who had interacted with members of CVLT and Greggy's Cult, and states that court records identify crossover in membership among the three. It reports that the Federal Bureau of Investigation stated in December 2025 that it was conducting more than 350 investigations connected to 764 and other nihilistic violent extremist groups, and that Canada was the first country to designate 764 as a terrorist entity.²¹ An NCITE briefing of August 29, 2025 had given the FBI figure as over 250 open investigations.²²

Year seven

On August 17, 2026 NCITE announced five new projects for its seventh research year, selected from 26 applicants after a DHS blind peer review. It stated that the Office of University Programs approved a 6.1 million dollar annual allocation under the ten-year cooperative agreement on July 10, 2026, that 17 projects would begin in early September, and that the center had been awarded more than 58 million dollars in DHS grants and contracts since 2020. The new projects include research on artificial intelligence vulnerabilities at sports and entertainment venues, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attack costs, drones and prosecution of illicit threat actors.¹⁴