NYC Terror Dollars: Addressing the Real Funding Problem

Jena McNeill / May 10, 2010

In the wake of last Saturday’s attempted Times Square bombing, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) is mad because NYC’s share of federal counterterrorism dollars has fallen over the past few years. These dollars, allocated through the DHS Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) have gone from “25% of the total funding pot in 2005 to 18% in 2010.” Schumer may indeed be right, that dollars have fallen, but he fails to address the more fundamental problem of UASI funding—the fact that more and more jurisdictions are receiving the money, leaving and less and less for actual urban areas.

In FY 2008 there were 42 UASI jurisdictions that could receive these grant monies—meant to serve large, urban areas where a terrorist attack would have catastrophic national consequences. This number, largely due to politics in Congress, however, continues to increase, now totaling 60—without any additional monies—diluting the pool of resources and under-sourcing America’s urban areas. (more…)