Ex-New York Police Department Chief Terry Monahan on Thursday slammed Donald Trump for slashing millions of dollars in federal counterterrorism funding to the department just weeks after the 24th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“Taking this money away, it endangers Americans all across this country, I find it has a catastrophic-type touch,” said Monahan in an interview with MSNBC’s Katy Tur. “It really puts all Americans in trouble.”
Monahan’s comments arrive after a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration on Tuesday from slashing $187 million in funding for the state from the Homeland Security Grant Program, which was launched in the aftermath of the 2001 terror attacks.
New York, 10 other states and the District of Columbia sued the Department of Homeland Security on Monday in hopes of restoring the funding, pointing to Trump’s day one push for DHS to withhold such money from states and cities with “sanctuary” jurisdictions that don’t fall in line with his mass deportation agenda.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), in a press release, called it “utterly shocking” that the administration would be “walking away from the fight against terrorism in the number one terrorist target in America.”
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NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the department is set to lose about $80 million in federal counterterrorism funding, calling the move a “profound mistake” in a time of “global conflict and surging threats.”
“To be blunt, this is the difference between a city that prevents the next attack and a city left exposed to it,” she said in a press conference on Wednesday.
Monahan — who served as NYPD chief from 2018 to 2021 — pointed to NYPD numbers that said counterterrorism operations prevented 71 terror plots since the 9/11 attacks, adding that some of the thwarted plans were tied to other U.S. cities in “red and blue” states alike.
As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approaches next year, Monahan said taking federal counterterrorism funding away from the nation’s largest municipal police force is “absolutely wrong.”
In the years since 9/11, the city has seen several other attacks including a 2022 subway mass shooting, a deadly truck-ramming attack on a Manhattan bike path in 2017 and a 2016 bombing in the city’s Chelsea neighborhood.