The "New" Homeland Security Math

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Source: Time

The "New" Homeland Security Math

By AMANDA RIPLEY Tue Sep 25, 2:20 PM ET

Over the summer, Congress passed and the President signed a new homeland-security law called "Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act." Finally, homeland security has been rationalized, we were told. The new law would fix the way money gets distributed so that the states at a greater risk of terrorism received a larger proportion of money, just as the 9/11 Commission had wisely recommended. After the bill was passed, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bragged that a Democratic Congress had done what the Republicans could not.


But the Congressional Research Service (CRS), in a report released last Friday and obtained by TIME, has concluded that the new formula does not live up to its billing. A close look at the math shows that rural, less-populated states like Alaska and Wyoming may still end up with a disproportionate share of the total money.

How could this happen? It all comes down to the magic of fractions. Under the old formula, every state was guaranteed at least .75% of the state-grant program - a very high minimum compared to other federal programs, which made sure that even less populous states with a relatively small risk of terrorism received a sizable chunk of cash. Since 9/11, billions of dollars in homeland-security grants have gone out under this bizarre and nonsensical formula, which TIME investigated in-depth in 2004. In the new law, however, Congress cut the minimum to .375%, and set the percentage to decline a little bit more each additional year.

Cutting the minimum in half, from .75% to .375%, sounds like real progress, right? But it turns out that, while the new formula reduces the percentage, it starts with a much bigger pool. The minimum percentage, as written into the law, is now a percentage of state grants plus something called the Urban-Area Security Initiative, a separate program dedicated to high-risk cities. That program accounted for $747 million in 2007. So the impact of the lower percentage is undercut by the use of a much bigger denominator, notes the report, authored by CRS employees Shawn Reese and Steven Maguire. (CRS is Congress's nonpartisan think tank, and its reports are not generally made public.)

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20070925/us_time/thenewhomelandsecuritymath