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Homeland security
The feds don't know where danger lies or where money should go

August 1, 2006
If you want to be safe from terrorists, do not - repeat, do not - go to Wisconsin. Or Indiana. They may be the spots terrorists have their eyes on, since, according to the Department of Homeland Security, they lead the nation in the number of vital national assets within their borders, the kind that, if hit, could inflict momentous damage.

Count up pieces of our critical infrastructure and you'll find twice as many in those states as in California. Way more than in New York. Indiana has twice as many as Virginia, which has the world's biggest Navy base, a critical international port and historic icons.

To make sense of this, consider some of the 77,000 things in the National Asset Database, according to a report recently released by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general: a tackle shop, a casket company, Old McDonald's petting zoo, a bean festival and, since terrorists' tastes may run downscale or up, Wal-Marts and a Rolls Royce distributorship.

This would be funny except for three things:

It suggests that, going into the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the federal agency devoted to homeland security is unable to identify what this nation's essential assets are and where its vulnerabilities lie, so efforts could be concentrated on protecting them.

The same bizarro database is used to make decisions about who gets hundreds of millions of dollars in anti-terrorism money. That helps explain why, last year, Indiana and Wisconsin got more than Virginia. Awash with money, Wisconsin spent it on such critical homeland security needs as a tractor to move airplanes at an airport near Sheboygan, a jet boat for La Crosse, scuba equipment for the Green Bay police and a digital camera for, it seems, every sheriff and his house cat. That's in the spirit of a national spending spree that has channeled millions of dollars into night-vision goggles for Alaskan outbacks and state-of-the-art fire trucks for tiny towns in Nebraska.

The agency doesn't even have the grace or insight to admit that the list is embarrassing, insisting that it's valuable. It does acknowledge that of the entries whose significance it has determined, those that are not nationally significant outnumber those that are three to one.

Blame for the addled approach lies with the feds, who let states decide for themselves what constitutes critical infrastructure, with no standardization. And it lies with states that exercised the kind of judgment that makes cynics despair of bureaucracies, adding an ice cream parlor, golf courses, a kangaroo conservation center and the annual Mule Day parade in Columbia, Tenn.

The inventory, of course, should differentiate between critical infrastructure and places you can play bingo. It should be limited to vital and vulnerable assets, such as nuclear and chemical plants, major seaports, computer hubs, supply chains and financial centers.

Since Sept. 11 the nation has squandered much of the billions spent in the name of homeland security. Congress designed the funding mechanism so it could treat the homeland security budget like pork - every legislator gets to bring some home - rather than concentrating what has been an awesome stream of money on the center of the risk bull's-eye.

This year, to free up money to protect a combination kennel club and poker room in another state, the Department of Homeland Security cut funding to Virginia and slashed by 40 percent grants for the nation's capital - home of the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, the seat of government and symbols dear to the nation's heart. While there's money for special urban area grants for Toledo, Omaha and Louisville, there's none for Hampton Roads - or any city in Virginia.

This has to stop. The ones to do it are the men and women in Congress - including John Warner and George Allen, Jo Ann Davis and Bobby Scott, Thelma Drake and Randy Forbes, who know the issues Virginia faces. Congress must stop treating the homeland security budget as a political slush fund and start dispensing money according to rational criteria.