Domestic Security Shell Game
Guess what? The Bush Administration is engaged in an involved budgetary shell game that makes it falsely appear that billions more are being spent on Homeland Security efforts. Thomas Oliphant explains:
Next year the administration proposes to spend about $41 billion on homeland security.
The $4 billion to $5 billion increase in the Bush budget, though, is largely illusory. For one thing, the numbers take advantage of the fact that there is still no appropriation for the current year that ends in September. Once this year’s spending is set by statute, the actual increase will be roughly half that. Then the shell game takes over. What Clinton noticed is that roughly $2 billion has been cut from the budgets of federal programs that beef up ”first responders,” those local workers who compose the front lines. The FBI will gets its money for strike forces and intelligence, Ridge’s new department will get a new building, and he will get a new office and staff, but cops and firefighters will be neglected.
The successful program her husband promoted in the ’90s to help localities hire more officers would be all but eliminated. The national program that assists local fire departments would be cut in half. The administration trumpets a ”new” proposal to combine federal law enforcement assistance money into one of those block grants conservatives love, hiding the fact that the proposed grant contains well over a half-billion dollars less than what’s in the programs it would replace. In all, Clinton estimates the cost at some 4,000 cops not hired nationally, plus untold thousands of firefighters. Clinton proposes that all these federal cutbacks be rejected, a minimalist idea that at least avoids harm.
This shell game is especially problematic when one remembers that the Bush Administration has so far not made good on promises to fund the greater domestic security efforts of local law enforcement.
(When the government goes to Code Orange, local responders go to higher alert, but the federal government — in what Oliphant calls the “ultimate unfunded federal mandate” refuses to appropriate money to cover the costs.)
The Bush Administration has so far neglected to take Homeland Security seriously. The most prominent sign of this is the White House’s refusal to propose appropriate funding for the necessary efforts.
Are tax cuts really a higher national priority?
What about BPI (boost-phase intercept)? Do you think it is viable? Why not spend a little money and time on it?