Grants Gaining Traction on Reducing Risk, Chertoff Says

Two weeks ago, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced which states and local governments would get their hands on the $1.69 billion in homeland security grants this year. Now he says those grants are clearly paying off, as we move toward a more secure homeland.

In an article on the Government Technology website, Corey McKenna says Chertoff made the remarks last week, saying the prospect of a secure homeland is an approachable reality.

“We have reduced our vulnerabilities. I mean, almost $30 billion in funds pays off. A lot of the cities and states [have] better tools, better capabilities. So we’ve been able to draw down some of the risk as far as the vulnerabilities are concerned,” he said.

That means the funding has become more targeted, McKenna adds. “If I compare where we are now to where we were when I came in 2005, you know, I remember in 2005 when I had been reading stories previously about money being spent on, you know, dog biscuits and leather jackets or whatever,” Chertoff said.

Will that now change the way the DHS hands out the grants? McKenna says it will, and that the DHS will now start looking more closely at the applications for grant funding coming in and start shifting priorities to other communities or other types of programs when it starts seeing requests for things that look more like ordinary, necessary expenses rather than investments in real terrorism capabilities.

“It seems to me that if a community doesn’t feel a need for homeland security money, they ought to say, ‘look, we think we’ve achieved what we need to achieve with Homeland Security and maybe that money ought to be directed to other programs or maybe we ought to apply for some other kind of thing,’” Chertoff said. “What I don’t want to do is define Homeland Security so broadly that it ceases to have the discipline that I think we’ve imposed on the program as we go forward.”