US tries to staunch wasteful flow of anti-terror funds (Financial Times)

The House of Representatives is set to vote on Thursday on legislation that would require homeland security funds to be spent mainly where the risk of terrorist attack is deemed highest. If it succeeds, it would be the first step in rolling back a pattern of waste that has been egregious even by Washington standards.

Glenville is unlikely to figure high on any list of potential terrorist targets.

The small town in south-east Georgia is little more than a ramshackle collection of one-storey wooden homes and whitewashed churches, surrounded by miles of farmland. Yet, beside a road junction outside the town stands a large billboard advertising a government website that informs people how to prepare for a terrorist attack.

The image illustrates one of the most striking features of the US response to the events of September 11: that much of the government money to protect against future attacks is being spent in places foreign terrorists would have trouble even finding.

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The homeland security department’s inspector-general reported earlier this year, for instance, that while $560m had been granted to improve the security of US seaports, much of the money had gone to projects that had little effect.

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In all, the report found that almost half the grants went for projects deemed marginal or unimportant by government reviewers.

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Much of the problem has been due to the way in which Congress allocated the funds in the months after September 11. Under the influence of politicians from rural districts eager to get their share of the new windfall in homeland security spending, the 2001 Patriot Act guaranteed that each state would receive minimum shares regardless of its location or population.

This sounds pretty typical of the Bush motus operandi: take advantage of events to do things that appear to be related to these events, and use it instead to divert government funds towards favored constituencies without any consideration whether this is in any way useful. Make Blue States pay for (unnecessary) subsidies to Red states. And label people “unpatriotic” if they dare complain about the use of funds for “Homeland Security”.

The same happened with the pork-laden “Leave No Lobbyist Behind” Energy Bill, and the same is happening with the Iraqi “reconstruction” funds.

Money – vast amounts of money, amounting in tens of billions of dollars – are spent in useless and unaccountable ways, they always seem to go pretty directly to the corporates that have funded Bushco’s campaigns and their owners, and they are not even funded, as they are paid for by a massive increase in US federal debt (while programmes like Medicaid are cut).

This is the biggest robbery of all times. Several hundred billion dollars over a few years, directly from future taxpayers’ money to private pockets – with no measurable impact for society as a whole.

Possibly the only silver lining is that the people who are currently trying to tighten the Patriot Act (Christopher Cox, a Republican who represents a Los Angeles area district, has used his post as chairman of the House homeland security committee to highlight much of the waste; Susan Collins, R-Maine, in the Senate) are Republicans. Can they be pulled away from the fiscal madness of Bushco? Or are they just trying to bring pork back home?

Waste, graft, corruption. Where’s the accountability? Where’s the fiscal responsibility? Where’s the decency?

Why has 9/11 become a “windfall” for Bushco and Republicans? How did that happen?