Granted, DHS had a funding problem
Is antiterrorism money going to the most deserving?
For Edward Reiskin, a deputy mayor of Washington, D.C., the epiphany came in late May, after he'd worked for two months with a cast of hundreds-including law enforcement officials who responded to the Pentagon on September 11-crafting a proposal seeking $188 million in Department of Homeland Security urban counterterrorism grants. "They called us the afternoon before the ... announcement," says Reiskin, "[to say] we wouldn't get the money we were expecting." Rather than $188 million, the capital region got $47 million; among the D.C. proposals shelved: purchasing hundreds of temporary hospital beds. "I was ... just incredulous," Reiskin says.
Lately, that sort of controversy has been the rule rather than the exception for the DHS Grants and Training Office, the latest incarnation of a bureau that has handed out more than $18 billion since September 11 while coming under criticism-fairly or not-for the way it has distributed the money. One New York representative said the office "declared war on New York City" when it slashed proposed security funding for D.C. and New York by 40 percent in May. Another DHS office has been ridiculed for keeping a database of potential terrorism targets that includes sites like a popcorn factory. Tracy Henke, who heads the 240-person grants office, recently announced she'd step down by the end of this month. This was "a transitional year for us," says George Foresman, an under secretary overseeing the grants shop. True enough, but others might term that a bit of understatement. And where it's all headed is more than a bit unclear.
Trust fund. Outside experts say some of the changes were badly needed. "We've come a long way, baby," asserts Jim Carafano of the Heritage Foundation, who says that more than a few states and localities had treated DHS grants like a "personal trust fund." Until 2006, the Patriot Act guaranteed that the largest first-responder grants would be handed out partly by giving each state a minimum percentage of funding: The result was that Wyoming got seven times as much per capita as New York. Congress repealed that formula last fall, and by the time Henke-a protégé of former Attorney General John Ashcroft-came into her position as a controversial recess appointment in January, DHS was focused on handing out most of this fiscal year's $3.35 billion grant pot according to "risk."
But Jack Harrald of George Washington University notes that assessing risk is "still more art than science." Cities applying this year for the $757 million in Urban Area Security Initiative grants-the program that slashed D.C.'s funding-were judged by a formula that considered intelligence, an area's vulnerabilities, and the consequences of an attack. A board of 100 officials, mostly emergency managers from around the country, also scored each proposal on how "effective" it would be. Dave Marin, a staffer for Virginia's Rep. Tom Davis, called the whole thing a disastrous "black box, Rube Goldberg grant process." Although it led the nation in threats against it, New York City suffered because it wanted cash for items like day-to-day overtime expenses for terrorism cops, rather than long-term investments like equipment.
DHS also has a problem with outdated and sometimes absurd data. A list the department put together of state-reported terrorism targets was roasted by both the DHS's inspector general and congressional auditors this year. Targets listed in the 77,000-item database included such places as the Old MacDonald's Petting Zoo in Woodville, Ala., and the Annual Mule Day Parade in Columbia, Tenn., prompting one report to say the list "lacks credibility." DHS insists it uses a refined database of 600 to 1,500 targets when allocating funds, but "even the short list has its big-time problems," says Tim Manning, who oversees grants for New Mexico.
Add to that potential ethical troubles. A report in the Washington Post this month said that DHS was examining whether two former employees of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory improperly directed $20 million to that institution-to manage the targets database, no less-while working at DHS. Foresman insists the now concluded "review" was part of what he hopes will be a routine vetting of major expenditures. But a portion of an additional $40 million headed to the lab has since been sent elsewhere.
Optimists hope such moves are signs of needed change. Sources say Henke was forced out because of the handling of the urban areas grants; the plan now is to communicate more with state officials and add a new layer of federal oversight. And this fall DHS announced the results of two smaller grant programs, both of which boosted New York's funding over the previous fiscal year-in one case, by almost 400 percent. DHS now has to focus on merging the grants office into a beefed-up Federal Emergency Management Agency, a move Congress approved as part of recent Hurricane Katrina-inspired reforms. "It's not clear yet" if that's good or bad for the grants office, says Albert Ashwood, head of the National Emergency Management Association. But some would contend that there's nowhere to go but up.
This story appears in the October 23, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.