Homeland Grants: Garbage In, Garbage Out

On Wednesday the Department of Homeland Security announced the FY 2006 state & local home­land secu­rity grant allo­ca­tions, an announce­ment that pro­voked an imme­di­ate firestorm of anger in New York City and Washington, DC, due to the dras­tic fund­ing cuts to the two cities that were attacked on 9/​11. Homeland Security Committee chair­man Peter King (R-​​NY) said that DHS had “declared war on New York,” and today noted (acc. to CQ) that his con­ver­sa­tion with DHS Under Secretary George Foresman was “the most heated con­ver­sa­tion Ive ever had with an appointed offi­cial” and that he “smelled incom­pe­tency” and DHS middle-​​managers were “phonies.” An edi­to­r­ial in the New York Daily News called for Sec. Chertoff to be fired.

That firestorm con­tin­ued to grow the next day, com­ing to a boil at an event at the Brookings Institution on home­land secu­rity at which Sec. Chertoff was speak­ing this after­noon. I attended the event, and a large share of his pre­pared remarks were a defense of these grant allo­ca­tion deci­sions. His key argu­ment was that last year’s fund­ing of $207 mil­lion for NYC was a “make-​​up year” for 2004, when NYC received only $47 mil­lion — and the new fund­ing level of $125 mil­lion was not a cut, but a regres­sion to the mean.
But Chertoff was called to task by a reporter to explain the one-​​page mem­o­ran­dum that was sent to New York explain­ing its fund­ing cut — a memo that states that there are zero “national mon­u­ments and icons” in New York City — a pro­nounce­ment that has raised the ire of New Yorkers (but also inspired some humor). Chertoff tried to ratio­nal­ize the deci­sion, stat­ing that key icons like the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building were counted in dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories, but his defense on this point was uncon­vinc­ing. At the very least, it’s a man­age­ment fail­ure that this memo was sent to NYC offi­cials with a sta­tis­tic that is so glar­ingly off-​​base at face value.
I think this deci­sion on NYC could be another exam­ple of the garbage-​​in, garbage-​​out (GIGO) prob­lem, which I argued in April was a fac­tor in the deci­sion to cut Las Vegas from the list of high-​​risk cities. Some of the met­rics on the one-​​page fact memo seem flawed in one way or another; for exam­ple, using the “quan­tity” of var­i­ous asset types in these cal­cu­la­tions fails to quan­tify their sym­bolic val­ues, and using the quan­tity of threat reports from cities fails to account for dif­fer­ent lev­els of dis­cern­ment across cities about what con­sti­tutes sus­pi­cious activ­ity.
I don’t think that these deci­sions were polit­i­cal; if you believe this, then you have to explain why Dallas-​​Fort Worth’s fund­ing was cut dras­ti­cally and North New Jersey’s fund­ing sky­rock­eted. And I think it’s a wise move on the part of DHS to require states and cities to develop detailed spend­ing plans prior to fund­ing, which could have been the cause of NYC’s fund­ing cut; accord­ing to news reports, NYC’s fund­ing was slashed in part because of the salary & over­time requests in their pro­posal. States and cities who were short­changed are cer­tainly likely to take this process more seri­ously next year — which can only improve the effec­tive­ness with which these funds are spent.
But I also think that DHS’s processes and method­olo­gies for assess­ing risk are still imma­ture, and they have become over-​​fixated on data (cf. Sec. Chertoff’s Mother of All Spreadsheets) of ques­tion­able value, and insuf­fi­ciently focused on the holis­tic, qual­i­ta­tive ele­ments of threat assess­ment. You can run the num­bers in any which way, but that shouldn’t change the fact that NYC and DC are the top two ter­ror­ist tar­gets in the United States — by far — and deserve to be treated as excep­tional cases when these fund­ing deci­sions are made.
UPDATE 11:42 AM: Sec. Chertoff’s remarks at Brookings are now avail­able here. The crit­i­cism of DHS con­tin­ued in Friday’s papers, with one story in the Washington Post not­ing that Washington, DC was in the bot­tom tier of risk for the state grant pro­gram (which is dif­fer­ent from the Urban Area Security Initiative, where the DC region was ranked highly), and another Post story crit­i­ciz­ing DHS Asst. Secretary Tracy Henke for favor­ing her home state of Missouri in the allo­ca­tion process, and the New York Daily News skew­er­ing DHS with the head­line “Chertoff His Rocker”. Some of these crit­i­cisms might be unfair or out-​​of-​​context, but until DHS opens the kimono on the grant decision-​​making process, it looks like “garbage-​​in, garbage-​​out.“
UPDATE 2:57 PM: A New York Times story quotes anony­mous fed­eral offi­cials say­ing that NYC has itself to blame, in part because it “mis­han­dled the appli­ca­tion itself, fail­ing to file it elec­tron­i­cally as required, instead fax­ing its request.” More here.
– Christian Beckner, cross-​​posted from Homeland Security Watch

June 2nd, 2006 | Homeland Security | 191422 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/06/02/homeland-grants-garbage-in-garbage-out/Homeland+Grants%3A+Garbage+In%2C+Garbage+Out2006-06-02+12%3A25%3A46murdoc You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.