Homeland Security Boondoggles
Representative Anthony Weiner, a New York Democrat, and Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, are teaming up to call for public disclosure of all counter-terrorism spending. Their sponsorship of the Homeland Security Transparency Act comes as the Department of Homeland Security is reviewing applications for the nearly $2 billion it will allocate to states and cities in 2007.
"There is pork going all over the country including my own district," Flake said. "Some of these simply don't pass any laugh test."
A few examples in the past couple years raising the congressmen's ire:
"It is an ongoing battle to keep New York and other large cities safe," said Weiner, who ran for mayor of Gotham in 2005 and may do so again. "We've got to fight for every homeland security dollar or we'll lose to bulletproof vests for Fido."
The proposed Weiner-Flake bill ambitiously would require state and local governments to report their spending of federal homeland security dollars quarterly, then require DHS to maintain a comprehensive database posted on the Internet.
"We do track that funds are spent according to goals that we set and according to the agreements that we reach with the states. We are transparent about it," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters today in response to a question from CBS News.
On a positive note, we checked out a report cited by Weiner and Flake that Kentucky spent $36,000 to detect terrorist money laundering in bingo parlors. The grant was intended but nullified when agents got the training for free from the Justice Department.
National security expert James Carafano, who spent 25 years in the military and is now a Heritage Foundation fellow, tells us the formula –set by Congress – whereby every states gets at least .75% of the $2 billion in grants is the root of the problem.
"The problem is then year in and year out that has become an expectation that every state should get that. That makes absolutely no sense. It's created some pretty screwy math, where you're spending over $10 per person on Wyoming and less than $2 per person on New York."
Weiner and Flake also call for reducing the number of urban areas that get special grants from 45 to a more concentrated 15. Already the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area is one of six urban areas poised to receive more than half the $747 million slated this year for cities. The others are Los Angeles/Long Beach., Washington, D.C. capital region, Chicago, San Francisco Bay area, and Houston. Thirty-nine other large and mid-size cities are due to divide the rest.
The congressmen's critique is not as comprehensive as last year's DHS Inspector General's audit which found petting zoos and popcorn factories among the thousands of places listed as "critical infrastructure" by states. DHS has whittled that list to 2,100, but don't expect to find it on the Internet – it is classified.