Bush Seeks Cut in Terrorism, WMD Response Funds

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The federal budget request submitted Monday by U.S. President George W. Bush would cut spending by 18.5 percent for the main federal office funding terrorism and WMD response efforts around the country, according to Bush administration figures (see GSN, Feb. 3).

According to a White House summary of the Homeland Security Department portion of Bush’s fiscal 2005 budget proposal, the president requested $3.56 billion for the department’s Office for Domestic Preparedness, compared with estimated spending of $4.37 billion on the office in fiscal 2004.

The proposed cut follows official predictions last year of significant increases for the office. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said in July that he expected about $7.5 billion per year to be available over the short term to state and local governments through the Office for Domestic Preparedness (see GSN, Aug. 8, 2003).

“This budget reflects some tightening of government spending, and we are very pleased to have an additional $3.5 billion to give out to first responders,” Homeland Security Department spokeswoman Rachel Sunbarger said today in an interview.

Asked Monday about the budget cut, Ridge said the office is adopting “a more targeted approach” to grant-giving.

The secretary cited an increase in one component of Bush’s Office for Domestic Preparedness budget request, the Urban Area Security Initiative, as one example of more targeted spending. The program’s budget is $727 million for fiscal 2004, while the president is requesting $1.45 billion for fiscal 2005.

The urban initiative provides grants to major cities based on population, presence of critical infrastructure and threat and vulnerability assessments. The main federal first-responder grant program, though, distributes funds based on a formula that does not take threat into account and has seen its budget cut. Under the responder grant program, every state receives .75 percent of the total program amount, and population determines how the rest of the funds are distributed.

The question of how to distribute the grants has sparked debate in Congress and elsewhere about whether to seek universal readiness to handle a terrorist attack or to give more weight to risk and impact assessments. Pending legislation would introduce an element of risk assessment into the first responder grant process (see GSN, Dec. 19, 2003), but Ridge made no specific reference this week to the prospects for more targeted spending outside the urban area program.

“You will notice a strategic shift,” Ridge said Monday of the president’s budget request, “from resources that go out to the states based on formula to resources … that go out to regions where we have basically an algorithm that says, ‘Let’s look at population, population density. Let’s look at critical infrastructure, and let’s examine the threat.’ So there is a shift of considerable resources from the basic formula program to a more targeted approach based on threat and potential catastrophic economic or human loss.”

Seeking to “put this all in perspective,” Ridge said there has been “a 900 percent increase” in first-responder funds for the last three years, compared with the previous three-year period. He said his department distributes “adequate dollars” to responders and must now “make sure that we’re getting a return on the investment.”

The overall outlook for more targeted spending on first responders is unclear, in part because the Homeland Security Department so far has limited capacity to assess the terrorist threat around the United States.

The department’s Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate is required under the 2002 legislation that created the department to conduct a national threat assessment, but department officials have said the project will not be completed for three to five years (see GSN, Jan. 30). Bush’s budget request includes $864.6 million ― a 3 percent increase, according to the Homeland Security Department ― for the directorate.

The senior Democrat on the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, Jim Turner (Texas), this week questioned whether the Homeland Security Department can better target first-responder spending without completing the national assessment, while the office of Committee Chairman Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) focused on the department’s existing capabilities. Committee Democrats and Republicans have clashed frequently over Bush’s homeland security policy (see GSN, Jan. 20).

“I am concerned that we are not spending our tax dollars as effectively and as wisely as we need to,” Turner said in a statement.

“The Department of Homeland Security must move forward with the congressionally mandated national threat and vulnerability assessment for us to know what our true priorities should be, and we must define the essential capabilities required for our first responders before we will know whether we are spending our tax dollars wisely,” Turner said.

Cox spokeswoman Liz Tobias, however, said the department’s existing assessment “capabilities are substantial, and we expect them to grow more substantial.”

“The committee and the chairman are very pleased that the FY ‘05 budget takes a step toward risk-based allocation” of the responder funds, Tobias said yesterday. She called Bush’s budget request “a fiscally responsible step” in keeping with the first responder legislation now before the committee.

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