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Editor’s note: In the sixth installment of our series, the ACAMS moneylaundering.com legal team reviews the legal and administrative tools federal officials can use to identify and prevent funds from reaching violent domestic extremists.

On Tuesday, September 10, nearly two decades on from the 9/11 attacks, the White House issued an executive order expanding federal efforts to identify, track, and arrest international and foreign terrorists and their material supporters, reflecting the government’s continued prioritization of foreign over domestic extremism.

A spate of deadly mass shootings within the United States have prompted calls for federal action against domestic extremism as well, but confusion over the inventory of U.S. laws and policies has allegedly impeded the government’s response.

Lawmakers have introduced legislation to broaden the government’s statutory authority against terrorism on the domestic front and simultaneously pushed the White House to compile a list of white nationalist individuals and organizations. But critics argue that federal law already covers domestic terrorism, and that bills on their own will not deter extremist ideology.

Meanwhile few, if any, have made disrupting funds from reaching domestic terrorists a priority. The lack of attention to illicit finance is surprising to some analysts, given that Congress has already passed several bills targeting “material support” of 57 terrorist-related offenses, including 51 federal “crimes of terrorism”—be it foreign or domestic.

Moreover, those same statutes have been used in only a handful of cases against domestic extremists. In 2015, for example, New York resident Eric Feight received eight years in prison for helping his friend, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, build and test a radiation weapon that he planned to use against Muslim Americans.

Both sought funding from undercover FBI agents they mistook for KKK members.

U.S. officials focus on the societal factors that fuel white supremacists and other right-wing extremists, but, unlike their campaign against Islamist terrorism, do not prioritize tracking their funds. Some agents have reasoned that domestic right-wing attacks are almost invariably perpetrated by lone wolves, and that financing plays only a small role.

But those attacks may still have financial elements worth tracking as evidence of links between international right-wing groups and individuals continues to emerge. Members of Rise Above, a white supremacist group in California, traveled last year to meet their counterparts in Europe, including a Ukrainian paramilitary unit that the FBI has linked to Nazism.

An indictment charging 57 alleged supremacists with drug trafficking, kidnapping, money laundering and other crimes last year led to the seizure of $377,000 in bulk cash, an amount then Attorney General Jeff Sessions categorized as “staggering.”

Domestic extremists require financing to maintain websites, organize marches and other events, promulgate literature and otherwise promote their ideology. Their donations often arrive through crowdfunding platforms and increasingly through peer-to-peer and cryptocurrency transactions.

The dark web in particular is threatening to become the forum of choice for lone-wolf actors to buy weapons and ammunition. Firearms by some estimates comprise nearly half of all listings on dark web marketplaces and generate tens of thousands of dollars of revenue per month.

In light of those and other findings, academics and other analysts want Congress to clarify laws already on the books and ensure that existing regulations, including those requiring financial institutions to report suspicious activity, are used more often in the context of domestic terrorism.

Contact Leily Faridzadeh at lfaridzadeh@acams.org