On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Javed Ali drove past the Pentagon on his way to work in northern Virginia.

Roughly half an hour later, American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the building.

From his office in Falls Church, Ali could see smoke rising from the Pentagon. A year later, in a turn that captured how dramatically the country had changed, he was walking into the still-damaged building himself — now working in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s counterterrorism office.

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«It was a very eerie and odd and surreal moment in my career,» Ali told Fox News Digital.

Ali’s career would eventually take him from the DIA to the newly created Department of Homeland Security and later the FBI, giving him a front-row seat to the enormous national security architecture America constructed after the deadliest foreign attack on U.S. soil.

Twenty-five years later, that architecture presents something of a paradox.

By one of its clearest measures, the post-9/11 system appears to have made another attack on the scale of 9/11 far harder. The United States has not suffered another terrorist attack remotely approaching the scale and complexity of 9/11, which killed 2,977 people. U.S. intelligence and military operations dismantled much of the al Qaeda network that planned it, while new agencies, surveillance authorities, watchlists and intelligence-sharing systems were designed to ensure that another group could not exploit the same seams in American defenses. The 2026 U.S. intelligence community assessment said counterterrorism operations have degraded al Qaeda and ISIS’s ability to quickly rebuild their leadership and plan large-scale attacks against the U.S. homeland.

But success against the threat of 2001 did not eliminate terrorism. It helped change it.

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A boy points towards the center of the reflecting pool at the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York on Sunday, Sept. 11, 2022. (Bonnie Cash/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Today’s most difficult threats increasingly involve individuals radicalized online, small cells with little warning signature, foreign terrorist organizations seeking to inspire attacks from afar, and an expanding layer of cyber and state-sponsored threats capable of reaching deep inside the United States without hijacking an airplane.

The question 25 years after 9/11, therefore, is not simply whether Americans are safer.

They are safer from one kind of attack — while increasingly exposed to others.

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Aerial view of the Pentagon building in Arlington, Va., on Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2025. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

Building a security state after 9/11

The scale of the American response was extraordinary.

Just over two months after the attacks, President George W. Bush signed legislation creating the Transportation Security Administration. TSA says its creation amounted to the largest civilian undertaking in U.S. government history at the time, with the federal government rapidly assuming responsibility for airport passenger and baggage screening.

The following year, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, combining all or part of 22 federal agencies and offices. DHS began operating in March 2003 and today employs more than 260,000 people across missions ranging from border and aviation security to cybersecurity, intelligence and emergency response.

The changes went far beyond new agencies.

President George W. Bush discusses creating the Department of Homeland Security following 9/11. (Getty Images)

The 9/11 Commission found that the pre-attack breakdown was deeper than the familiar failure to «connect the dots.» Responsibility had been scattered across agencies, information was not consistently shared, and no single entity was empowered to integrate intelligence and drive joint action across the foreign-domestic divide. The commission concluded that «responsibility and accountability were diffuse.»

Washington spent the next two decades trying to close those gaps.

Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that post-9/11 wars and related obligations have cost roughly $8 trillion. It estimates that more than $1.1 trillion has been spent on homeland security efforts to prevent and counterterrorism inside the United States since DHS was created.

Al Qaeda didn’t disappear overnight

Ali said it can be easy, with 25 years of hindsight, to forget how persistent the original threat remained.

Even after the United States invaded Afghanistan, killed or captured senior al Qaeda figures and put the organization under extraordinary pressure, the group continued attempting to find ways back into the homeland.

During Ali’s years at DHS, he said officials repeatedly confronted plots involving al Qaeda and its affiliates, including a 2006 plot originating in Britain to bomb transatlantic airliners traveling to North America.

The threat then evolved again.

Usama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan in May 2011. But rather than marking the end of the era of jihadist terrorism, the following years produced a new and in some ways more difficult challenge.

ISIS grew out of al Qaeda in Iraq, expanded rapidly amid the wars in Iraq and Syria and declared a self-described caliphate in June 2014. At its height, the group controlled vast territory and millions of people in Iraq and Syria while encouraging or directing attacks far beyond its borders. The State Department reported that ISIS had emerged from al Qaeda in Iraq and expanded dramatically during 2013 and 2014.

For U.S. counterterrorism officials, Ali said, the center of gravity increasingly shifted from identifying trained operatives sent by an organized group to finding individuals who might be radicalizing inside Western countries.

Then came another shift: attacks by lone offenders across different ideologies, often with no direct operational relationship to an organization overseas.

«Mostly lone actors, lone offenders, not tied to groups overseas, not traveling overseas, and not being directed by people overseas,» said Ali, now an associate professor of practice at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy.

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A U.S. Navy SEAL provides cover for teammates advancing on a suspected al Qaeda and Taliban location during missions in Afghanistan supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. (Mai/Getty Images)

The terrorist organization became a phone screen

The transformation is now reflected in the government’s own threat assessments.

The 2026 Annual Threat Assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said setbacks to the ability of Islamist terrorist groups to conduct «large-scale complex attacks» have pushed them toward information operations and propaganda designed to inspire or enable people in or with access to Western countries.

The assessment said there were at least three Islamist terrorist attacks in the United States in 2025 and that law enforcement disrupted at least 15 U.S.-based Islamist terrorist plotters that year. Roughly half of those disrupted plotters had some online contact with Islamist terrorists or were inspired by foreign terrorist organizations, according to the assessment.

The vulnerability was demonstrated on New Year’s Day 2025, when Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. citizen from Texas, drove a pickup truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 people. The FBI described the attack as an act of terrorism and said Jabbar had become increasingly isolated before adopting extremist views.

In the days after that attack, the FBI said lone actors and small cells who radicalize online had posed the greatest terrorism threat to the homeland in recent years precisely because they can be so difficult to detect and disrupt.

That presents almost the inverse of the 9/11 problem.

The 9/11 plot required 19 hijackers, overseas leadership, financing, international travel, flight training and years of planning. The challenge for investigators was collecting pieces of information held across different agencies and assembling them quickly enough.

A lone actor may offer far fewer pieces to collect in the first place.

Ali said many recent attackers or alleged plotters had not previously come onto the radar of the FBI or local law enforcement, leaving authorities with the extraordinarily difficult task of identifying people who may not commit an obvious crime until they move toward violence.

«So yes, we are safer from a certain type of threat,» Ali said, «but again, we are not immune from terrorism, and other types of threats are much more difficult to identify or stop.»

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A handout released to Reuters by IntelCenter shows members of Somalia’s Islamist rebel group al Shabaab in Mogadishu Jan. 1. (IntelCenter Handout/Reuters)

A security system built for yesterday?

That changing threat has also fueled a broader debate over whether the institutions created after 9/11 became too large, too expensive or too focused on the dangers of the previous era.

Morgan Murphy, who served as press secretary to the secretary of Defense during the first Trump administration and later worked in the Trump White House, argues that Washington built too much bureaucracy around the 9/11 threat while other vulnerabilities grew.

«TSA agents still pat down grandma and gum up travel while Beijing wires our living rooms with cheap TVs and selfie sticks through the supply chain handed to them by Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden,» Murphy said. «We spent two decades frisking American passengers while our adversaries plugged themselves into our homes and businesses.»

«The genius of America after Pearl Harbor was that we built to fight. After 9/11, we built to process,» Murphy told Fox News Digital, «Real security means sovereignty at home and lethality abroad — a sealed border, an untangled supply chain, and enemies who fear us.»

Theo Wold, who served as acting assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy and as deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy during the first Trump administration, offered a similar critique, arguing that post-9/11 Washington relied too heavily on large bureaucracies, expansive government authorities and wars in the Middle East.

«George W. Bush and the D.C. governing elite responded to 9/11 the way their politics demanded: create large, unwieldy bureaucracy, push for special legal authorities with limited oversight and activate ground wars in the Middle East,» Wold told Fox News Digital.

«Those wars didn’t make us safer, the legal authorities were wielded against Americans, and the bureaucracy is full of waste and has proven nearly unworkable,» he said.

Wold argued that the lesson from the past quarter-century should be a more narrowly targeted national-security model.

«Now we know better. Americans are safest when we are nimble and focus ruthlessly on targeting real enemies,» he said.

The next threat may not look like 9/11

 The challenge now extends beyond terrorism.

ICE arrests a suspected al Qaeda member released into the U.S. by the Biden administration. (ICE)

The 2026 intelligence assessment warns that China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and non-state ransomware groups continue seeking access to U.S. government networks and private critical infrastructure for espionage, financial gain and possible future disruption. It also warns that artificial intelligence is accelerating cyber capabilities and that several state adversaries are developing missile systems capable of threatening the homeland.

The security landscape that began with al Qaeda operatives training to fly passenger jets has therefore expanded into something far less geographically defined: terrorist propaganda transmitted to an individual’s phone, malicious code inserted into a computer network, attacks on critical infrastructure and state adversaries capable of reaching Americans from thousands of miles away.

For Ali, however, the evolution of the threat should not lead Washington to conclude that the original threat has vanished.

One of the central lessons of the years before Sept. 11, he said, was that emerging terrorist organizations have to be confronted before they have the time and space to develop operational capability.

«When these terrorist threats start to emerge, whether it’s overseas or here, you have to put pressure on them before they gather momentum to carry out operations,» Ali said.

The danger, he argued, would be allowing counterterrorism to fall so far down Washington’s list of priorities that the country begins recreating the complacency that existed before 9/11.

«Terrorism as a tactic is probably never going to be defeated,» Ali said.

Twenty-five years after he watched smoke rise from the Pentagon, Ali’s answer to whether America is safer reflects the contradiction at the heart of the post-9/11 era.

The United States built a massive system to prevent the next 9/11.

It appears to have made another 9/11 far harder to execute.

Two flags flutter on a fence in front of Lower Manhattan and One World Trade Center at the Tear Drop 9/11 Memorial at sunset on June 13, 2026, in Bayonne, New Jersey. (Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)

The harder question now is whether that system can recognize the attack that doesn’t look anything like it.

It’s a twofer in the Senate.

Senators return to Washington Monday for the first time since the wee hours of Aug. 8. The Senate’s slated to meet for three weeks before heading home for the midterms — if the session even goes that long.

There are a lot of items senators want to tackle. But only two big ones are lined up for test votes right now.

The first legislative vote is locked in. It’s a procedural vote on a measure to regulate cryptocurrency. That comes Tuesday afternoon. The bill needs 60 votes to be in play.

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There’s no bigger advocate for cryptocurrency than President Trump. He’s pushing for the Senate to move legislation.

«We ended the war on crypto once and for all,» said the President. «Now we need Congress to take the next step by passing the Clarity Act.»

Let’s clarify what the Clarity Act does. The measure clarifies federal rules for digital currencies and tokens. The framework would divide oversight between two regulators: The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC). Approval of the bill would be the first step toward establishing guardrails for cryptocurrency.

«We passed the Clarity Act in the House last summer with 78 Democratic votes. It’s now time for the Senate to join us,» said House Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill, R-Ark., on Fox Business.

The package has bipartisan support. But there’s a roadblock coming from the Democrats.

«The one remaining significant issue, I think, is the ethics provision,» said Hill.

President Trump’s own financial disclosure report reveals he earned $1.4 billion on cryptocurrency last year alone. That’s why Democrats want specific rules for the Trump family and crypto.

«It basically exempts the President from any kind of ethical constraints. And that’s just not going to fly in the Democratic caucus,» said Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., says the bill is too closely aligned with what the President and his industry allies want.

«Yes. We need crypto legislation. But not this legislation that has been written by this industry,» said Warren. «I just don’t see how anyone, Democrat or Republican, moves forward on this bill.»

That’s why many doubt the measure can score 60 votes twice to break a filibuster. The naysaying aggravates cryptocurrency advocates.

«This is the right bill at the right time, and it’s time to vote,» said Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wy.

She argues that crypto supporters bowed to demands to firm up ethics rules.

«In 2023, we added 100 pages with stronger consumer protection provisions. Yet we got feedback from colleagues that they wanted more. So again, we listened. Today, this bill that was under 300 pages is more than 600 pages. That’s hundreds of pages built over 11 months of daily bipartisan negotiations in windowless rooms where colleagues from both parties shared their priorities, and we worked diligently to incorporate them,» said an exasperated Lummis.

Warren argues that the bill makes it easier for drug runners and terrorists to fund their operations — without a literal paper trail.

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Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts and ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, speaks during a hearing in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026. (Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Lummis says if the U.S. doesn’t establish its cryptocurrency blueprint, digital assets could flee overseas.

«These companies can go to Singapore, Switzerland, the UAE and have a well-understood clear set of regulations,» said Lummis.

So that test vote is locked in. But it’s rare to pass a major financial regulatory measure this close to the midterms. And if Democrats prevail in November, that could create friction with the White House.

The Senate also expects a test vote before the end of September on a bill to regulate money in college sports. But there’s no specific agreement on a date for that roll call tally.

You know the old saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity? Well, the «bad» publicity surrounding college football could potentially provide this legislation a boost.

President Trump implored senators to stay in Washington to finish the bill last month. But it wasn’t ready. However, controversies over former pro players heading back to college — to say nothing of clock maintenance at the University of Michigan — could prod skeptical senators to give this measure another look.

Let’s start with LSU tight end Dae’Quan Wright. If you can keep up with him.

Last year, Wright played for current LSU head coach Lane Kiffin last year at Ole Miss — before Kiffin abandoned his squad late in the season for the Tigers. Wright decided to go pro. The Philadelphia Eagles picked him up in the spring. But then waved Wright early last month. The Cleveland Browns then signed Wright. He dressed for a preseason game against the Buffalo Bills. Never played a snap. Then the Browns cut him.

So, Wright headed back to school. But this time, at LSU.

«I’m just putting on a college uniform again and going out there and having fun and embracing my opportunity,» said Wright.

A judge then cleared Wright and former Ole Miss defensive lineman Zxavian Harris to play for LSU this fall. But in between, Harris appeared in preseason camp with the New Orleans Saints — before the team waived him.

Drew Rosenhaus is Wright’s agent. He believes his client had no other option after his brief cup of coffee in the pros.

«His contract with the NFL was terminated,» said Rosenhaus. «If he was still able to play in the NFL, he would be there.»

Chaos like this is prodding lawmakers to try to regulate intercollegiate athletics.

«It’s not fair to the high school kids coming out to play college ball if you suddenly have colleges that are going and recruiting from the NFL,» said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

Cruz teamed up with Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the Commerce panel, to craft the college athletics regulation measure.

One big restriction: the legislation limits athletes to one transfer.

«The transfer portal is out of control. You have athletes transferring two, three, four times. You have essentially no eligibility rules. So you have athletes competing six, seven, eight years. You have 28-year-olds competing against 17-year-old kids,» said Cruz.

The constant darting around from school to school worries the Trump administration, too.

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The U.S. Capitol building is shown in Washington, D.C. A Romanian man admitted to participating in a series of «swatting» calls that targeted members of Congress, as well as other government officials. (Heather Diehl/Getty Images)

«It’s a crazy system, man,» said Vice President JD Vance to colleague Lucas Tomlinson. «When I was growing up…you would get some loyalty, between the athletes and the fan bases. You would know the names of the people who played for your team because they were there for three or four years.»

The Cruz/Cantwell package also caps money schools can use for name, image and likeness, or NIL. And, considering the recent contretemps, the legislation bars athletes from going pro. Then reversing field to college.

The White House tapped legendary former Alabama football coach Nick Saban to push for passage of the bill.

«Join the winning team today and help Congress protect this American tradition,» says Saban in the commercial now airing around the country.

But even if the bill gets through the Senate, it faces an unclear path in the House. The House returns to session Monday, too. But it’s unclear how long its members will stick around with the midterms looming.

«I’ve had coach Saban in my office, and we’ve talked about this, and he’s right,» said House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. «I think Congress is ready to act. But it takes both chambers.»

In other words, just like there’s a play clock in football, there’s a play clock in Congress, too.

«I appreciate the exuberance of our Senate colleagues,» said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar, D-Calif. «But I don’t know if there’s enough days to get this done.»

Time may be the enemy of both the cryptocurrency bill and the college athletics bill. Lawmakers return to Capitol Hill with one foot practically out the door, headed back toward the airport.

It’s a Senate twofer. But if things don’t sail smoothly on either or both bills, there may be little reason to anchor lawmakers to Washington. And if lawmakers don’t address these bills now, potential legislative fixes may evaporate until the new Congress begins in January.