Public Service in America: A Decade of Danger and the Choice to Fix It

 “Unless you drop out of the race ... the next pipe bomb will be live.” That’s the message a local town supervisor running for county clerk received alongside an inactive pipe bomb thrown into her home while her family slept. It was far from an isolated incident. 

We’re in a national crisis: Public service in the United States is more dangerous today than in recent history. Threats against the U.S.’s nearly 40 million current and former public servants span vitriolic statements, doxxing (publishing private information online with malicious intent), swatting (falsely reporting a serious event to law enforcement or emergency responders), harassment, stalking, assault, and even murder, and they’re increasingly happening at every level of government, including at the local level.

Between May 2024 and March 2025, calls for impeachment and violent threats against judges rose by 327 percent across social media and fringe platforms—and by 537 percent on TikTok. From Oct. 1, 2024, to June 16, 2025, the U.S. Marshals Service said it investigated 408 threats against 297 judges. By mid-September 2025, the U.S. Capitol Police reported it was on track to investigate 14,000 threats to members of Congress, their families, and their staff, spanning political parties.

The threats facing the U.S.’s public servants have wide-reaching consequences. Fear of violence is deterring people from running for office. School board members have quit in record numbers due to trolling and harassment. Others are leaving government service rather than risk their families’ safety. Law enforcement agencies have had to divert limited resources to respond to doxxing and swatting. The government’s ability to deliver at every level is being unnecessarily undermined, with U.S. taxpayers shouldering the burden. 

Think about it: If you were a public servant or considering a run for office—or doing any job with potential visibility—and you knew that one of the trade-offs was not just increased public scrutiny but also that someone might dox your child or send you and your spouse death threats, wouldn’t you hesitate to serve in government, too?

In the United States, this should not—and need not—be considered normal. Public service is a form of patriotism, and all public servants—at all levels of government and regardless of political affiliation—should be able to serve their fellow Americans without fearing for their own or their families’ safety. 

The good news is that there are five steps elected officials, policymakers, and everyday citizens can immediately take to start making public service safer nationwide: (a) loudly condemning violence on a bipartisan basis to lower the temperature; (b) scalably expanding coverage of public servants’ security costs through public-private partnerships; (c) enacting stronger data privacy laws; (d) responsibly holding accountable those who threaten or harm public servants; and (e) demanding that social media companies mitigate online threats, including doxxing, while protecting free speech.

Measuring Violent Threats to Public Servants in the United States

Violent threats against U.S. public servants are skyrocketing. To capture the scale of the problem, our teams at the Public Service Alliance and The Impact Project built The Security Map: a nationwide visualization of threats to public servants that aggregates data from leading experts and more than 1,000 news stories. Our analysis reveals that threats to public servants have increased at every level of government and across every state in the country since 2013. When you dig deeper into the data, the picture becomes even more alarming.

For instance, we found that local officials—such as school board members, county clerks, and police officers—account for one-third of the targets over a decade. In one instance, a man was arrested for allegedly stalking three judges at once; in another, an individual sent an email to a city commissioner’s wife that said: “Your husband should tell the truth, or your three kids … will be fatally shot.” The email included personal information such as their residential address, a photo of their home, and their children’s ages. The list of chilling threats goes on.

Our data also found that roughly a quarter of violent threats were concentrated in seven battleground states, where heightened political tension likely creates disproportionately high risk. Notably, in these states, public servants were more likely to receive threats from out-of-state actors than their counterparts in other states.

Because our dataset relies on publicly available reporting, it almost certainly underrepresents the full scope of threats, particularly in cases that received limited or no media attention. That means many acts of intimidation and violence against public servants never appear in the public record. We will update The Security Map in the coming months as we identify and verify additional cases from the past decade and track new incidents as they occur in order to better reflect the risks public servants face.

The Choice to Fix the Problem and Make Public Service Safer

Threats terrorize public servants and their families, who are left unsure if a message will turn into violence, or whether they can afford the often cost-prohibitive measures to stay safe, creating a dangerous chilling effect.

To begin solving this problem, first, bipartisan leaders across all levels of government can unequivocally condemn every instance of political violence—regardless of the victim’s political affiliation or whether it made national news or occurred in relative silence. Research shows that high-profile bipartisan condemnations are actually effective at reducing political violence. Members of Congress, governors, state legislators, town council members, and other politicians at all levels could do so by leaning in to the efficacy of high-profile joint appearances—as Sens. John Curtis (R-Utah) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) did in a moderated conversation at Utah Valley University, and as Govs. Spencer Cox (R-Utah) and Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) did more recently in a moderated discussion at the National Cathedral—to underscore bipartisan unity around reducing political violence.

Second, government agencies can help public servants cover basic security costs, such as data privacy deletion services and home alarm security systems, including through public-private partnerships with organizations such as the Public Service Alliance that can help achieve cost efficiencies. Although some federal agencies have previously provided resources to certain at-risk personnel, the range of support has been limited and fragmented, too reactive, and not designed for scale. At the state and local levels, it is virtually nonexistent, often due to resource constraints. There have been some recent improvements, such as the steps Congress has taken to provide members with additional security resources given the growing threats they face. However, these measures still fall short, particularly because they don’t apply to staff who are sometimes at equivalent risk.

Third, states can pass strong data privacy laws that protect personal information—such as home addresses—from unnecessary online disclosure. They can also penalize companies—through, at minimum, substantial fines—that disclose or sell public servants’ protected personal information without consent, and allow public servants to redact the same information from public records. Basic privacy protections for public servants and core First Amendment principles are not mutually exclusive. Violent targeting of public servants is often facilitated by insufficient limitations on sensitive personal information online, as it has for decades in other contexts such as domestic violence, stalking, and gendered violence.

Fourth, state attorneys general and prosecutors can continue to responsibly hold accountable those who threaten, attack, or harass public servants. To do so, these leaders can leverage not only existing criminal laws but also lesser-known civil statutes in ways that advance public safety, without infringing on protected rights. In the broader D.C., Maryland, and Virginia area, for example, those laws could include ones providing robust civil remedies to enable officials to obtain certain protective orders that carry criminal penalties if violated. Responsible use of these laws is vital for many reasons. For instance, there is a critical distinction between the publication of someone’s home address online with the intent to intimidate their family or provoke violence against them, and filming a police encounter or reporting about public officials and their activities in line with journalistic ethics and as lawful. Conflating the two is harmful to both preventing future violence and protecting civil liberties while upholding public safety. 

And lastly, social media platforms—where violent rhetoric too often runs rampant—can demonstrate responsible governance and enforce rules against doxxing, harassment, and abuse. These platforms can strengthen or enact policies to ensure clear reporting mechanisms for possible threats, criteria to differentiate between information in the public interest versus information used with the intent to incite violence, and reliable escalation pathways so that particularly dangerous situations are rapidly assessed and flagged for law enforcement when appropriate.

To ensure no American is forced to choose between serving their communities and protecting their families, we can take the practical steps described above to start making public service in the United States meaningfully safer.