Bob Barr

Homeland Security Belt Not Very Tight

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

January 18, 2006

Reflecting the adage “better late than never,” the federal Department of Homeland Security recently announced a new formula for doling out federal taxpayer dollars to cities for homeland security projects. However, the new guidelines, while designed to correct the many abuses of the multibillion-dollar program instituted in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, probably will go the way of most efforts to reform federal grant programs—more talk than results.

This year, 50 U.S. cities, including Atlanta, are on the list to receive some $800 million in so-called Urban Area Security Initiative grants. Although overall federal spending on Homeland Security grants for cities and states has been quite significant in recent years, totaling nearly $9 billion since Sept. 11, this year’s total for cities actually reflects a decrease of some $120 million from last fiscal year.

Still, the sum represents a large pool of dollars, the spending history of which has been largely irresponsible, if not downright ridiculous. Whether the new formula results in significantly fewer such instances remains a major question, but the answer is likely to be “no.”

In one of the most ridiculous examples of urban misspending, Newark, N.J., spent a quarter of a million dollars last year on new, state-of-the-art, air-conditioned garbage trucks from its federal Homeland Security grant.

Not to be outdone, Washington—ever the epicenter of misspent taxpayer dollars, and which received more than $145 million in grants—used its windfall to buy snazzy leather jackets for its police officers. It also spent $100,000 to send sanitation workers to a Dale Carnegie course and $300,000 to fund a computerized car-towing service that the city’s unrepentant mayor, Anthony Williams, had been long yearning for as a way to curtail fraud by local towing companies.

The mayor’s imaginative spending also found its way to send another $100,000 to the city’s summer jobs program, which—this is no joke—included funding of a new rap song on “emergency preparedness.” And the taxpayer dollars keep rolling in, to our nation’s capital and to cities across the continent.

Even though the grant program’s spending history has been, in the words of one Department of Homeland Security official, quoted anonymously recently in a national newspaper, “Neanderthalic” and “sophomoric,” the new formula announced this month by DHS chief Michael Chertoff is unlikely to have a major remedial impact.

But political forces, including intervention by congressional appropriators such as Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who heads the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, will almost certainly continue to thwart real efforts to reform the process.

In testimony before a House committee last spring, for example, one expert on federal grant procedures testified at length on questionable uses to which federal anti-terrorism money had been spent, noting that the “knee-jerk” reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks has resulted in allocations based on politics rather than sound science. American Enterprise Institute scholar Veronique de Rugy illustrated the point by highlighting the fact that federal tax dollars had been used to fund projects such as:

•$63,000 for a decontamination unit stored in a warehouse in rural Washington state because there is no HAZMAT team to use it.

•$22,800 spent by another Washington state county to purchase six radios that are incompatible with other radios in the county.

•$30,000 spent by a Wisconsin county to buy a defibrillator for a high school basketball tournament.

•Nearly $100,000 for a “training course in incident management” in Michigan that “no one attended.”

•$557,400 for the tiny (pop. 1,570) town of North Pole, Alaska (Stevens’ home state).

While Georgia and Atlanta, thankfully, have escaped being cited in such testimony and news stories as examples of nonsensical uses of federal anti-terrorism grants, the rest of the country has not been so lucky. And, despite this latest effort to “reform” the process, the stories of waste, fraud and abuse by local and state governments that continue to view such pots of money as “windfall” (in the words of one local, Tennessee police chief), will continue to make all American taxpayers, including those of us in the Peach State, the losers yet again.

Bob Barr occupies the 21st Century Liberties Chair for Freedom and Privacy at the American Conservative Union Foundation.