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NEW YORK — The World Cup, a 48-team, 104-match behemoth kicking off this week in Los Angeles and across 15 other cities in the United States, Mexico and Canada, presents an unprecedented security challenge, with more countries, games and a larger footprint than ever before.

It also comes against the backdrop of the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran, mounting political violence in President Trump’s orbit and growing fears of artificial intelligence-fueled disruptions, creating a complex threat environment for authorities.

Overseeing the sprawling security apparatus is a legion of federal agencies, state and local police departments and private entities. Their responsibilities range from securing stadiums and fan zones to escorting teams and protecting dignitaries.

Their tools include hunter drones that can shoot nets over objects in restricted airspace, bag-inspecting robot dogs, giant X-ray trucks and thousands of AI-powered cameras trained on public spaces soon to be thronged by fans.

In the U.S., it’s “78 Super Bowls over 39 days,” said Andrew Giuliani, executive director of Trump’s World Cup task force, which is overseeing the multiagency effort.

“There’s never been a summer like this in American history from a security angle,” said Giuliani, son of former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. “We’re as prepared as we can be.”

Collaborative effort

The tournament has the same high-level federal security designation as the Super Bowl, just below a presidential inauguration or a national political convention, ensuring federal, state and local coordination. It coincides with other major events linked to the 250th anniversary of America’s founding.

So far, Giuliani said, there are no credible threats.

The Department of Homeland Security, focused on Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown and with a funding lapse only recently resolved, estimates that as many as 7 million people will visit the United States for the World Cup.

The U.S. Secret Service, under scrutiny after security breaches and attempts on Trump’s life, is in charge of protecting world leaders who show up to cheer on their countries. Trump has expressed interest in attending a match.

“I feel very comfortable where we’re at, and we feel like we have a zero-fail mission,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Congress last week, noting that the Secret Service was understaffed by about 860 agents. “But it’s going to be complicated.”

Officials have indicated they are confident they can keep Trump safe because they will be integrating his usual security into the robust World Cup plan on days he may watch a match.

The FBI has spent two years developing its security plan, incorporating lessons from other major events such as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and New Year’s Eve ball drop in New York and testing them at smaller ones, including last weekend’s Israel Day parade in the city.

“We prepare for the worst day,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Amit Kachhia-Patel in New York told the Associated Press. “And that’s how we go into any single event.”

To help cover security costs, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has distributed $625 million to the 11 U.S. host cities. An additional $250 million is being directed toward tracking and neutralizing suspect drones.

The disbursement of those funds was held up by the department’s funding delay in Congress, which the Trump administration has argued hindered security planning.

Others involved in the planning effort said the federal government could have played a more hands-on role even before the partial shutdown.

John Cohen, a former senior Homeland Security official who has been briefing state leaders before the matches, said the government was largely absent from planning meetings last year and did not begin sharing threat intelligence with host regions until recently.

“With an event of this magnitude, one would expect the federal government would’ve played a more active role,” Cohen said. “It felt like a missed opportunity to showcase that collaboration.”

Evolving threats from drones and AI

In January, thousands of officials involved in World Cup security gathered for exercises simulating crowd surges, vehicle attacks and mass shootings.

A month later, the U.S. and Israel launched a war with Iran.

“The security picture fundamentally changed,” said Stefano Ritondale, chief intelligence officer at Artorias, a defense intelligence company not involved in the security preparations. “There’s a major difference in preparing for a lone-wolf radical who rams his car into a public place and a terrorist who is bankrolled by a foreign country we’re at war with.”

Among the greatest concerns are drones.

Since the last World Cup in Qatar in 2022, drones have become a prominent weapon in conflicts including Russia’s war in Ukraine and Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

“If there is one threat that keeps me up at night, it is from drones,” said New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, whose department is partnering with the FBI on drone mitigation.

Drones are prohibited over stadiums and fan zones, and Kachhia-Patel said the FBI has a “full suite of options” to thwart incursions. They include agents monitoring the sky and a “variety of means” to safely down the devices, he said without elaborating.

Before this year’s World Cup, the growing sophistication of AI videos was a particular concern, with officials warning that state actors can harness the technology to sow misinformation and panic.

On match days, the FBI will activate joint operations centers in each host city, bringing together local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to monitor and investigate threats.

“If there’s a video that shows an explosion going off at a site, and it’s AI-generated, we have people on the ground who can validate whether or not that’s true,” Kachhia-Patel said.

Opportunity for private tech

Some AI companies have pitched themselves to police departments in host cities, promising to comb through data and surveillance on game days to prevent threats, including unruly fan behavior.

“We know sports fanaticism around here in terms of the NFL and baseball to some extent, but nothing like international soccer,” said Jake Becchina, a police spokesperson in Kansas City, Mo., which is hosting six matches.

The department has contracted with Peregrine Technologies, which promises to sift through police data and publicly available information such as team practice locations and the country affiliation of popular bars, to get ahead of possible conflict.

In Dallas, a recent $120-million tech upgrade will give local police body cameras capable of real-time translations, helping law enforcement communicate with international visitors soon to descend on the region.

Several drone detection and mitigation companies are joining efforts to help federal agencies secure the skies.

One of those companies, Fortem, has claimed to have signed a multimillion-dollar contract with the Department of Homeland Security before the World Cup for an unusual drone mitigation strategy: quadcopters that can shoot nets at encroaching drones to trap them in midair. A Homeland Security spokesman declined to discuss the contract.

Just as the teams will aim to perform their best on the pitch, Giuliani said the security planning was a unique chance to “show off American exceptionalism.”

“If we do our job right,” Giuliani added, “nobody will be talking about security at the World Cup.”

Offenhartz, Sisak and Santana write for the Associated Press. Offenhartz and Sisak reported from New York, Santana from Washington. AP writer Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington contributed to this report.

Weeks after Trump administration officials announced that management of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory would open to competitive bidding for the first time, questions remain as to why Caltech could lose control of the lab its researchers founded in 1936.

On one hand, observers note, high-profile delays and cost overruns on significant recent JPL projects earned sharp criticism from NASA even before the 2024 presidential election.

On the other, the second Trump administration’s record of squeezing scientific funding and attacking institutions in Democratic-led states make it difficult to consider any action as separate from the charged political atmosphere, analysts say.

“My first instinct is that this [competition] isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s not written in stone that Caltech must run JPL, and it wouldn’t be the worst thing to have some competition for running the place,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the nonprofit Planetary Society.

“That said, that requires this contract evaluation to be fair and unbiased, and this administration has no credibility in such things,” he added. “The responsibility is on NASA to earn the trust and ensure such an evaluation is open and free from political meddling. That’s almost impossible.”

JPL became part of NASA when the space agency was formed in 1958, and Caltech has been awarded the contract to run the institution outright ever since.

Its current 10-year contract with NASA, which is valued at up to $30 billion, runs through Sept. 30, 2028.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced the competition on May 22 as part of a slate of sweeping organizational changes at the space agency.

“When you step back, it is worth considering how many additional missions we could have undertaken with the resources lost to program cancellations and cost overruns over the years,” Isaacman wrote in a memo to staff. “That is the problem we must fix, so the American taxpayer and space-loving community can receive the highest scientific return on every dollar we spend at NASA.”

Allowing competition on the contract for JPL, the lone Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) in NASA’s portfolio, was an effort to address cost-efficiency concerns, Isaacman wrote.

“This process will take several years, and I do not anticipate it having any impact on the projects underway or the location of the facilities,” he wrote. “It does, however, provide an opportunity to evaluate management costs, overhead burdens, and ideally find ways to get after the science faster and more affordably.”

In a joint statement, Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum and JPL Director Dave Gallagher said that the competition was “no surprise” and that a team was already in place “to ensure we are positioned for success.”

In July, NASA’s Office of Procurement held an informational event for companies and institutions interested in the upcoming FFRDC contract.

The dozens of registered attendees included universities such as USC, Texas A&M and Georgia Tech; aerospace companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin; and nonprofit corporations like MITRE, which manages several FFRDCs, and Universities Space Research Assn., a university consortium founded by the National Academy of Sciences in 1969. (SpaceX, which has been awarded more than $13 billion in NASA contracts in the last decade, was not on the list.)

“Lockheed Martin has more than 50 years of deep space exploration success with JPL, supporting landmark missions to Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Pluto, including nearly a dozen missions to Mars,” said Bob Behnken, vice president of exploration and technology strategy. “We look forward to building on that unmatched partnership in the years ahead. We are closely following NASA’s review and will continue to assess how we can best contribute to the agency’s mission.”

Other attendees contacted by The Times declined to discuss their involvement.

Isaacman indicated that JPL could come under scrutiny even before he took over NASA. The billionaire entrepreneur referenced high costs at the La Cañada Flintridge institution in a memo prepared in advance of his confirmation hearings on his priorities for the space agency.

“Contract structure: Very expensive,” Isaacman wrote of JPL in a table outlining organizational issues at each of NASA’s centers. “Must increase the output and ‘time-to-science’ KPI,” or key performance indicator.

The institution has recently suffered a number of high-profile management stumbles.

After the JPL-managed Psyche mission to a metal-rich asteroid failed to meet its 2022 launch date, NASA commissioned an independent review that said internal reorganizations and personnel changes created distracted and uninformed managers and burned-out, stretched-thin staffers.

After a 2023 independent review found there was “near zero probability” of the JPL-managed Mars Sample Return mission making its proposed 2028 launch date, and “no credible” way to bring rocks back from the Red Planet within the stated budget, Isaacman’s predecessor, Bill Nelson, put out a call for proposals to industry and all other NASA centers, forcing JPL to compete for its own project.

After Trump’s election, Nelson announced that the final decision would be in the next administration’s hands.

The White House pushed for massive cuts to NASA’s 2026 budget that Congress overturned, and has lobbied for similarly steep cuts again this year. JPL has instituted painful cost-cutting measures of its own, reducing staffing from roughly 6,500 employees in 2023 to 4,500 last year through layoffs and attrition.

Its struggles come at a point when NASA is enthusiastically embracing private industry. Last month the agency awarded several key contracts for its upcoming lunar missions to Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and other private companies.

Trump has also made no secret of his willingness to punish states that haven’t voted for him through job losses. In announcing his decision to move U.S. Space Command from Colorado to Alabama, Trump acknowledged that his loss in Colorado in three presidential elections played a part in the move.

It’s impossible to consider any decision on JPL’s future as separate from the administration’s track record of politically motivated decisions, Dreier said.

“At the heart of this is why? Why now? If this is not just some rank political attack on California, what do they hope to gain from this?” he said. “That deserves explanation, because the administration otherwise has no credibility here.”