San Diego Union Tribune: Wyoming at risk?

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UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

Wyoming at risk?

Homeland spending too often goes to pork

July 13, 2005

If anything should have helped focus federal lawmakers on how crucial it is to use anti-terrorism funds with great prudence, it was last week's vicious attacks in London. The bombings of three subway cars and a bus underscored how vulnerable an open society is to the depraved sorts who think mass murder is a profound political statement.

Five days later, it became plain this lesson didn't sink in. Yesterday the Senate voted 71-26 for a plan to spend $2.5 billion on Department of Homeland Security projects that mandates that all 50 states get at least 0.55 percent of the funding, no matter how little risk they face. Similar rules have been in every homeland security appropriation. All illustrate how quickly the post-Sept. 11, 2001, push for domestic security metamorphosed into a 21st-century version of pork-laden highway bills.

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Unfortunately, there are many more reasons to worry about homeland security than congressional micromanaging. The San Jose Mercury-News ran a startling report about what terrorism targets in the Bay Area the federal government decided were eligible for additional funding beyond the mandated per-state minimum. The list included a San Jose miniature-golf course and a San Francisco mall named Candlestick Mills that was proposed but never built. It didn't include the 85,000-seat stadium where Stanford plays its football games.

How could such mistakes be made? The feds never ran their list by local officials.

What's so dismaying about such stories is that trying to determine how much homeland security is enough is already an insanely difficult calculus. The more we spend, the greater a toll the effort takes on our economy and taxpayers. So the least we can hope for is that what is being spent is being spent wisely. Yet from Washington to Palo Alto, there's depressingly little evidence that this is the case. If you disagree, we've got a mall near Candlestick Park we'd like to sell you.


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