The official said around 20 research projects funded by Homeland Security faced varying degrees of delays because of rulings by the DHS’s Privacy Office that deemed them high-risk even after researchers repeatedly explained that the information they intended to use was widely available to the public.Those issues are likely to come up this week as Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas makes public appearances to address the government’s response to violent extremism, a national security priority for the Biden administration.Within DHS, the official speaking anonymously said, one view is that privacy officers are trying to shield Mayorkas from potentially controversial research at a time when federal agencies are criticized by both major political parties for their response to political violence.In one example of a stalled project, a University of Maryland terrorism research team was awarded $2.6 million in September 2020 to build a database of nationwide attacks based on publicly available information — essentially, a digital repository of newspaper clippings.Her proposal to Homeland Security was a U.S.-focused spinoff of the GTD that would take details from public reports of attacks and analyze them across various categories: motivation, targets, deaths, injuries, weapons, and so on."