Department of Homeland Security

Year after year, state auditors have pointed to bookkeeping problems at North Carolina’s Department of Crime Control and Public Safety, an agency in charge of distributing homeland security and disaster recovery grants. But each year after returning to have a look at previously reported issues, the auditors had to append this statement to each one:

“As of today, two years have passed since the audit report in which the finding occurred was submitted. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is not currently following up on the audit finding.”

That language is buried in mammoth annual reports known as “single audits,” routine financial inspections that states undergo to ensure they’re properly managing federal funds and to help guard against waste, mismanagement and fraud.

But the Homeland Security Department’s failure to act on audit findings contained in the reports, which can include questionable payments that violate federal guidelines and may need to be returned, has been a deficiency for several of its preparedness grant programs.

The understated remarks from auditors in North Carolina’s case seem to illustrate how much Washington is actually involved in policing the funds. Among other things, auditors concluded in 2008 that the state’s public safety department had devoted $200,000 more to administrative costs from one grant than rules allowed. “The department should institute controls to ensure that the administrative cap in not exceeded,” a report said.

The feds have placed restrictions on the grants so that more money is available for things like training and equipment. But state and local grantees have long complained that the amounts they’re allowed to use for bureaucratic responsibilities aren’t enough.

North Carolina officials disagreed with the finding arguing that the costs complied with program guidelines and were permitted by the Department of Homeland Security. But auditors had already made the same determination previously in 2007 when they questioned $20,000 worth of spending. The state called that a simple “classification” error. It happened the year before that, too, when auditors zeroed in on $170,000 that busted the administrative ceiling. That time the state forgot to assign the costs to a new fiscal year, officials countered.

Reports contained multiple other findings. In one instance, hundreds of thousands of dollars in excess funds were accidentally drawn from the federal treasury and not returned until eight months later when the mistake was discovered, which led to the federal government losing out on $24,000 in interest. A similar erroneous drawdown occurred separately with $43,000. In another incident, standard reports prepared to show how much North Carolina had spent in a given year from sundry grant programs were variously under-and-over stated, sometimes by millions of dollars.

The Homeland Security Department’s inspector general, Richard Skinner, paid a visit to North Carolina in 2006 for a look at its anti-terrorism grant spending. His office questioned $426,000 worth of expenditures for a number of reasons – equipment that wasn’t allowed (including a $460 subscription to satellite cable), purchases that couldn’t be explained with available documents and expenses shifted to the federal government that North Carolina had already accrued on its own, like a $13,000 hydraulic ram.

The report also criticized a plague of staff turnovers at the state’s Division of Emergency Management, a weak accounting system and “significant cost overruns” associated with individual grant investments. State officials responded that they would investigate the questioned purchases and seek invoices from local governments to verify them. They also argued that some of the gear was permitted but simply wasn’t included in earlier budgets.

State officials added that hiring personnel was based on what grants were available to cover them, so North Carolina had little choice but to rely in part on temporary and contract workers, which federal auditors said didn’t receive background verifications despite being exposed to “potentially sensitive information held in public trust.”

When we submitted a request under the state’s open-records laws, authorities in North Carolina turned over a computer spreadsheet covering several years of grant spending. The file is available for download here in Excel format. It doesn’t offer rich detail as digital records in some other states do. But it’s still possible to get an idea of how much each community received year to year.

Records show that North Carolina has invested significant resources in building a fusion center, which every state has established with the help of grants to collect and share intelligence on possible terrorist threats. Civil libertarians view them as a throw-back to ‘60s-era domestic police spying, however. The North Carolina Information Sharing and Analysis Center can access several law enforcement databases, and an October 2007 report from the federal Government Accountability Office described it this way:

“[North Carolina’s fusion center] will enhance and facilitate the collection of information from local, state, and federal resources and analyze that information so that it will benefit homeland security and criminal interdiction programs at all levels. Specifically, [the center] develops and evaluates information about persons or organizations engaged in criminal activity, including homeland security, gang activity, and drug activity.”

No place suffered more severe of a psychic blow from the Sept. 11 hijackings than New York City. One chilling dimension of the attacks illustrates how complicated the recovery effort became.

Death certificates were issued for 2,746 people in the wake of the tragedy. But four years after 9/11 when the unparalleled effort to identify missing people using DNA technology was officially called off, the remains of more than 1,000 had not been identified. Their families had a piece of paper declaring them a victim. But there was nothing for them to bury.

Forensic biologist Robert Shaler of New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner led the campaign to test the boundaries of DNA, which resulted in modern science connecting names to 844 of the victims. Other identifications were made using dental X-rays, fingerprints, photographs, personal effects and tattoos.

In a later book about his experience, Shaler described how responding to mass casualty incidents and preparing for catastrophe is a multifaceted challenge that communities in America large and small still struggle to grasp, perhaps due to the rarity of immense destruction here.

“Working a mass disaster was something I never asked for or wanted, though I had always expected that working in a forensic laboratory in New York City meant my turn would come,” he wrote. “It was a given; only a matter of time. I assumed it would be an airliner crash or bombing. … I hadn’t conceived of two planes and two buildings. And certainly not the Twin Towers.”

Arguably, the state of New York faces greater pressure than anyone else to demonstrate what effective response and recovery looks like and to prove that every dime spent on homeland security will produce measurable results. The state has received hundreds of millions of dollars in anti-terrorism and readiness funds since 2001. New York’s representatives in Washington have rarely missed an opportunity to argue that they deserve more.

But public interest watchdogs who want to determine how well the Empire State has managed such enormous investments face two significant hurdles. One is identifying which agencies are actually in charge of the money. A second is figuring out how to overcome national security restrictions placed on key documents that would help answer questions about the spending.

We sent open-records requests to multiple offices that appeared to be responsible for homeland security grants, from the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services to the New York Office of Homeland Security, and from New York City’s Office of Management and Budget to its Office of the Criminal Justice Coordinator.

The management and budget office responded with one document, a site inspection done to evaluate the New York City Fire Department’s handling of federal funds. That report, dated Jan. 26, 2009, says fire officials could not locate a pricey 46-inch, high-definition television. Three other such items were still in their original boxes and not being used. The department responded that the televisions were scheduled to be installed as part of a larger project, “and FDNY is on track to have the equipment operational by March 31, 2009,” two years after the TVs were received.

From the state’s criminal justice services division we were given another single document. It’s an audit of $978,000 in grants awarded to the city of Buffalo through the Urban Area Security Initiative. The report questioned nearly $934,000 in personnel charges that covered routine patrols during an “orange” heightened alert period. Regular salaries for a police chief, captain and local fire department employees were also charged to the grant.

“These costs would have been incurred by the city regardless of the terror alert level,” the report found. “The audit concludes that reimbursement of these expenditures constitutes supplanting of local funding.” An attached 2006 letter says the findings were resolved by transferring the questioned expenditures to a “state-funded account.”

We sought from the New York Office of Homeland Security detailed records showing how the entire state had spent its federal anti-terrorism grants since 2001 hoping there would be a computer file containing individual transactions. But only hard-copy invoices were available and they had not yet been digitized. Xeroxing them would involve thousands of pages and require up to two months for completion, officials told us.

There were additional difficulties. New York’s Office of the State Comptroller has produced numerous reports in recent years on preparedness cash spent inside and outside the Big Apple. But each of the documents contains some variation of this language:

“Our audit identified certain areas in which controls over the use of homeland security funds needed to be improved. These findings and recommendations were provided to agency officials during the conduct of the audit. The details of our findings and recommendations are not included herein due to the sensitivity of the information.”

Follow-up reports did say that improvements were made, and one pointed to a best practice for which the state had received praise. Authorities used a “risk-based distribution formula” to deploy more than 150 emergency-response trailers across the region containing personal protective gear, detection devices for possible weapons of mass destruction and decontamination equipment.

“Through centralized purchasing, the state was able to equip municipal jurisdictions with resources they needed, and also provide for a level of standardization in these resources from one jurisdiction to the next,” auditors determined.

Still, enough publicly accessible documents exist to further show that New York has not been immune to the grant oversight problems other states faced:

• The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene bought 380 GPS systems for its fleet of vehicles. Subscription fees alone for all of them cost $126,000. But when auditors showed up three years after they were acquired, more than 100 of the devices were unused and being warehoused in Brooklyn and Queens. Department officials responded that they planned to install the items later after procuring new vehicles, but that plan became “severely delayed.” Due to pressure stemming from the audit, administrators negotiated for a refund from the GPS dealer of $93,000. Auditors also discovered, however, that a high-tech robotic arm for testing biological agents with a $188,000 price tag sat in storage for more than a year. So did a $183,000 machine for mass mailings “to provide the public with comprehensive information about bio-terrorism and response.” The department had to pay a storage company $4,800 until it could be put to use. Following up in June of 2009, auditors reported that their findings had eventually been resolved.

• The New York Harbor’s Waterfront Commission used $619,000 in port security grants to purchase laptops and other equipment so its police force could remotely access photo ID, licensing and registration databases “to help combat terrorism.” But investigators disclosed in an August 2009 report years after the funds were awarded that the system was not operational or otherwise used for its intended purpose, in part due to a “lack of proper training.” The commission spent another $170,000 on a boat for patrolling the harbor telling the federal government it would help detect “a waterborne attack” and “deter an attack by a small craft with an IED.” Officials instead deployed it only “sparingly and irregularly” using it to escort guests and VIPs during a fleet-week event, a probe found.

• Clear explanations weren’t available for $161,000 worth of “landlord administrative fees” and an advanced system for maintaining public-health records that cost $3 million, according to a March 2008 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general. School administrators in New York City had claimed in grant applications that automating health records would enable them to identify bioterrorism threats as soon as possible. But employees who used the system told the inspector general that it had no such readiness application. Management officials, however, insisted in response to the report that it did contain a bioterror component, but “possibly the appropriate school personnel were not interviewed” by the inspector general.

The state of New Mexico receives money from the federal government in the form of grants to help pay for defeating threats from terrorists, preparing for potential catastrophes and prosecuting criminal cases that arise on the southwest border where national security challenges are exceptional compared to what other areas of the country may face.

Unfortunately, state officials in New Mexico keep having to pay the money back after poor management problems with the funds are identified.

In early 2006 a report revealed that New Mexico was forced to return $130,000 to the Department of Homeland Security from a fund for domestic preparedness. The money was spent on purchases that were not permitted by grant rules including “salaries, fringe benefits, travel, supplies, and other costs,” according to an audit obtained through a public records request. That report and others were not available online previously but are now posted here.

Then later in the year, the U.S. Justice Department’s inspector general questioned the state’s use of more than $1 million it received under the Southwest Border Prosecution Initiative, a special program aimed at helping Arizona, California, Texas and New Mexico carry out criminal court cases at the state and local level. Many of the involved prosecutions are initiated by regional drug trafficking and organized crime task forces made up of multiple law enforcement agencies.

Federal auditors found that $769,000 worth of expenses claimed under the initiative covered the cost of cases that weren’t eligible. Another $286,000 was excessively reimbursed to New Mexico due to inaccurate cost calculations, a report shows, and $42,000 more in charges couldn’t be adequately explained with available documents.

The following year in 2007, New Mexico still owed an estimated $260,000 back to the federal government as a result of the findings.

The state’s Department of Public Safety responded in both instances by promising better oversight practices and to return funds for charges that were determined to be unallowable. “Future expenditures will be scrutinized to assure payments are within the guidelines of the program and are properly supported,” the department vowed. “Employees will be trained in grant compliance and accountability.”

Officials had complained in the past that they didn’t have enough staffers and resources to handle many of the administrative responsibilities, including carrying out a full inventory of preparedness gear purchased with grant funds, which is critical since responders need to know the location of rescue equipment, for instance, in the event of an emergency.

Though it took time, some of the issues cited in audits were resolved to a limited degree, records show. New Mexico state lawmakers in 2007 created a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management where many grant-related duties were transferred after a confusing mix of offices for years shared the handling of various readiness and recovery tasks. The border prosecution grant was shifted completely to an office of district attorneys.

More problems were disclosed in 2008, however. A wildfire that led to the evacuation of 1,000 New Mexico residents in Albuquerque and a loss of power for 16,000 people triggered $1.7 million worth of federal assistance from FEMA during the summer of 2003.

When auditors working for the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general showed up later, state officials couldn’t verify “a significant amount of the costs,” because key documents were missing such as invoices and payroll records. More than $800,000 in costs claimed by what was then New Mexico’s Office of Emergency Management were ultimately questioned, according to a September 2008 report.

The document shows that the United States Forest Service, which helps battle blazes, may share some of the responsibility, a problem we noted in our profile of Montana. But answers about the spending from New Mexico administrators weren’t contained in the report due to “ongoing disaster activity” elsewhere in the state at that time.

Our attempts to obtain detailed records from New Mexico demonstrating how it’s used federal anti-terrorism grants in recent years didn’t gain much traction. The state office in charge of them initially turned over an 11-page document that’s extremely light on specifics. (The city of Roswell, for instance, received nearly $1.4 million from various 2004 grant programs, but there’s no description at all of what happened to it.) Follow-up calls and e-mails for better-quality documents went nowhere until late 2009 when the state agreed to give us more information, though it still had not arrived at deadline.

Meanwhile, the director of homeland security and emergency management for New Mexico, Tim Manning, has since become a deputy administrator for national preparedness at FEMA under Barack Obama. The House Homeland Security Committee held a hearing in October of 2009 to find out why FEMA officials had still not developed an objective tool to demonstrate how $29 billion in anti-terrorism and readiness grants so far have brought the nation greater security.

Here’s what Manning had to say:

“Intuitively, we could answer the question ‘Are we better prepared?’ with a ‘yes.’ We could validly point to the amount and type of equipment that has been purchased, the physical security improvements that have been made, and the planning and training improvements that have occurred, and conclude that we are better prepared. … However, intuitive conclusions are not good enough. DHS and FEMA are committed to answering questions of preparedness with a greater degree of accuracy. … ‘Are we prepared?’ and ‘Are we better prepared?’ are questions that we have wrestled with throughout the history of these grant programs. In the end, the answer to these questions will be found in rigorous analysis and the development of precise metrics which will enable us to connect dollars spent to results achieved and ultimately to improvements in preparedness.”

One of the major contributions New Jersey made to homeland security in the United States is Thomas H. Kean. A former Republican governor of the Garden State, Kean was chair of the 9/11 Commission, which investigated and eventually reported in telling detail the events surrounding the Sept. 11 hijackings.

The commission’s final 2004 report contained a list of recommendations for the U.S. government to prevent such a tragedy from occurring in the future. Among them, the commissioners argued against allowing anti-terrorism grants to become a new brand of federal handout that local constituents came to expect.

“In a free-for-all over money, it is understandable that representatives will work to protect the interests of their home states or districts,” the commission’s final report stated. “But this issue is too important for politics as usual to prevail. Resources must be allocated according to vulnerabilities.”

Kean himself has been a fierce critic of the formula used to distribute homeland security grants. A year-and-a-half after the panel first published its findings, the bipartisan members issued a report card examining how well Washington had done by then in implementing practical measures to make the nation safer.

The result was blistering. There were five F’s, one of them earned because Congress had still not significantly altered the way in which it handed out readiness funds to emergency responders. They were awarded to state and local communities with no real consideration of risk, vulnerability, or the potential consequences of an attack “diluting the national security benefits of this important program,” the commission concluded. At that time, billions of dollars had already left the federal till.

The government also received several D’s for failing to adequately promote information sharing between law enforcement agencies, taking only minimal steps to protect privacy and civil liberties in the post-Sept. 11 surveillance age and not implementing meaningful congressional oversight of the nation’s intelligence apparatus.

Commission chairman Kean publicly ridiculed the method used to award grants calling it “deeply flawed” and encouraging Congress to “eradicate the unwise system” of minimum portions given to everyone regardless of location and population, which did little to distinguish between the town of Deadhorse in Alaska and Manhattan. Policymakers did eventually enact limited reforms in 2006 designed to ensure a more sophisticated process that took into account the likelihood of an assault occurring.

But the legislation still faced bitter resistance from congressional delegates representing smaller, rural states who angrily defended the right of township police forces and volunteer firefighters to receive aid. And today, government auditors continue to complain that the federal government hasn’t established a reliable yardstick to measure how much the grants – totaling about $29 billion as of 2009 – have actually left the country more secure.

Kean has also been skeptical of the federal government’s many investigations into home-grown terrorism since 9/11 raising questions about whether certain Bush-era prosecutions stopped a reasonable threat. Critics expressed doubts about one widely publicized case involving a father and son from Lodi, Calif., who were accused of seeking to recruit Islamic extremists and attending an Al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan. The younger man, Hamid Hayat, was later sentenced to 24 years in prison, but a retired FBI agent who views the probe negatively argued that the defendants were coerced into confessing.

In an interview with the PBS program “Frontline” during 2006, Kean said: “When you say ‘disrupt a plot,’ the second thing is you look at it and say, ‘Was the plot real?’ Frankly, you've got a lot of nuts in this country, unfortunately, who are always talking about doing this or that. … The American people have got to understand what's real and what's not real, so that they can be part of the defense of this country. … We've got to be very, very serious about what's credible and what's not credible.”

To be clear, while Kean and other elected officials have argued that a more risk-based system should be used for apportioning preparedness grants, New Jersey hasn’t been free of the problems other states suffered in managing the funds.

Auditors found in 2007 that the New Jersey State Police had cancelled a large equipment purchase totaling $675,000 awarded through the Urban Area Security Initiative, but the money was not returned to the federal government. They also questioned another $652,000 in spending because documents weren’t available to fully support the purchases or paperwork provided didn’t agree with amounts charged to the grants. The state’s Department of Law and Public Safety promised in response to carry out better bookkeeping practices, but similar findings were noted by auditors during previous years and in other reports.

We were not able to obtain from New Jersey detailed records that showed every transaction the state made involving homeland security grants. But in response to a request filed under the state’s Open Public Records Act, officials did supply us with three years worth of purchase reports. They’re available for download here. Communities must buy equipment with their own money first before being paid back later. The final column titled “reimbursed” refers to how much the grantee ultimately received from Washington.

While the descriptions are generalized and some information was even blacked out by authorities for security reasons, it’s still possible to detect themes in New Jersey’s grant spending from past years. The state paid at least $373,000 in overtime to personnel for “intelligence-sharing activities” from 2005 grants during a heightened alert, for instance. Essex County in the northeastern section of the state spent $900,000 in grants from that year on surveillance cameras, barriers, impact-resistant doors and building-access control. Emergency responders in Hudson County bought all-terrain vehicles and a mobile-command post using $630,000 from the funds.

We first sent an open-records request to New Hampshire’s Department of Safety under the state’s Right-to-Know law in September of 2008 asking for records showing how federal anti-terrorism grants had been spent there since 2001.

Officials responded that it would take at least 15 business days to determine what records were available and what they were free to withhold under legal exemptions. More than a year passed before we received 323 pages of documents that included invoices and budget worksheets for grant-purchased equipment that went to communities across New Hampshire.

Federal grant cycles are open for as long as three years, meaning homeland security funds can be spent well after they’re first awarded, so the records are incomplete and cover a portion of the years 2003 to 2008. A grants specialist at the Department of Safety was reluctant to even make the information publicly available arguing that it could make New Hampshire vulnerable if terrorists knew the types of preparedness gear state and local agencies bought.

Despite its small stature, New Hampshire has received tens of millions of dollars worth of preparedness cash in recent years since the distribution formula ensures that each state receives a base amount no matter its size. We’ve uploaded the documents here so that taxpayers can see how considerable sums of public money have been spent and judge on their own the merits of 10 “reflective traffic cones” purchased by the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office for $117.

The records also show that Carroll County sought a $550 pair of “tactical binoculars” and $10,000 worth of “tactical entry equipment.” The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles needed 75 radiation detectors costing a total of $116,000. The Manchester Fire Department in southern New Hampshire paid $53,000 for security devices to guard a wastewater treatment facility. Police in Nashua, N.H., used more than $250,000 to purchase a mobile-command unit from the Wisconsin company LDV, Inc., plus an additional $3,600 on lettering for the vehicle.

Just the lights and sirens for another command truck in the town of Newton, where the population is about 4,600, cost nearly $10,000. Salem, N.H., has around 29,400 residents and police there bought two ballistic shields for $3,100, a spotting scope, “tactical fence climbers” and night-vision gear complete with helmet mounts costing $17,400.

A fire department in Portsmouth spent $350,000 on a 33-foot boat and told the Boston Globe in 2007 that they’d waited years for the chance to get it. Previously the city relied on what was once a fishing vessel outfitted with a 200-gallon water tank. But the new craft can pump 2,500 gallons per minute. Portsmouth’s fire chief boasted that his community had not wasted money on all-terrain vehicles “or foolish things like that.”

But others in New Hampshire did buy such things. Records show that the state collectively spent at least $140,700 on ATVs, and $378,000 more for two armored trucks from Massachusetts-based Lenco Industries, Inc.

Being a smaller, less populated state doesn’t necessarily mean New Hampshire’s grant purchases are unreasonable. According to records, the state has invested heavily in better dispatch technology and new public safety radio equipment, which emergency responders everywhere need to more effectively communicate across one police or fire department and another, a major post-9/11 initiative known as “interoperability.”

State auditors in a 2006 report, however, expressed concern that a local emergency 911 call center in Concord, the capital of New Hampshire, didn’t offer a default message for citizens calling in when the lines were overloaded. In other words, 911 at the time may have given panicked citizens in need of help a busy signal. A supervisor for the state Bureau of Emergency Communications told auditors that a message did exist when the system was initially installed and he believed the feature was still in place. Yet no one could say for sure.

“The bureau was unable to prove if they have a functioning call-waiting message,” auditors stated. “Such a utility would seem to be essential in keeping callers seeking emergency assistance on the line. The bureau may wish to further investigate this issue until it is satisfied it has a functioning message to retain callers.”

State auditors discovered several problems when they showed up to the Nevada Department of Public Safety’s Division of Emergency Management in the fall of 2008. But officials there strongly disagreed with many of the findings and fired back in a lengthy response letter.

Among other things, auditors concluded that the division had failed to report a possible conflict of interest in which an employee was involved in a company that put together emergency operations and response plans for local communities. The same state worker was also responsible for supervising an office that reviewed and maintained the plans.

A letter from the company’s president claimed the man only had a limited affiliation with the business and received no salary, but auditors said in a report that no documents were turned over to substantiate the claim. The emergency management division, for its part, decided the employee was merely “moonlighting” and that no action needed to be taken.

“Because [the division] did not follow procedures, a thorough investigation was not done to determine whether the employee used his position to obtain favorable treatment for the corporation,” the audit report said.

No doubt emergency operations plans are an issue for Nevada. Developing them across the country has been a critical element of state homeland security initiatives emphasized by the federal government. State law also requires that the office guide local agencies in establishing such plans so that they’re ready for unavoidable catastrophes.

But the emergency management division didn’t have on file dozens of them for school districts, resort hotels, tribal nations and other state agencies. The plans weren’t present even for some critical offices such as Nevada’s public utilities and emergency-response commissions. Many planning documents lacked evidence that they’d been updated annually.

Preparedness officials had nonetheless given themselves a top score in the area of disaster planning when reporting to the federal government and the Nevada governor’s office.

The plans are supposed to include a list of available preparedness gear, but two of the logs were dated back to 1994. There were other issues with equipment. Emergency responders need to be able to quickly locate it since their responsibilities largely hinge on sudden, unanticipated events. And the federal government requires detailed inventory logs that show the location and condition of incident-command vehicles, gas masks, decontamination tents, search-and-rescue tools and other items purchased with preparedness grants.

State authorities used a computer database for this purpose, but in 2006, the only employee who knew how to operate it retired, plus, the business that conceived the program went belly up. So for two years the state went without it until a new one could be installed, according to auditors.

Nevada’s Department of Public Safety responded angrily to the audit calling it “misleading” and “a misrepresentation of the division’s capabilities.”

“The division has demonstrated through consistent performance the state’s ability to effectively and expeditiously respond to and recover from eight disasters since 2004,” division chief Frank Siracusa wrote in a letter.

Siracusa said his office had no statutory authority to force anyone else to maintain an accurate emergency operations plan. They could threaten to withhold federal grant funds for not complying, but according to Siracusa, “some jurisdictions do not recognize this as an incentive.” As for schools and tribal nations, state emergency personnel complained that they didn’t have the staff needed to oversee those preparedness plans. High turnover in emergency management offices has been a problem for other states.

The letter also said that Nevada’s public safety director was “completely briefed” on the alleged conflict of interest and he felt the emergency management division handled everything appropriately. The matter didn’t need to be reported to an internal affairs office for investigation, because it answers to the head of public safety who’d already decided such as probe wasn’t necessary, Siracusa argued.

Either way, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, noting that Nevada had received $148 million in federal readiness grants over a four-year period, lashed out at the public safety department in a scathing editorial and argued that local governments had fought disasters in the past without state bureaucracy:

“The state’s audit of the Division of Emergency Management confirmed the existence of yet another budgetary black hole, of an abyss of accountability, of a multimillion-dollar fraud put upon the taxpayers in response to their terrorism fears. Lawmakers don’t need to follow-up on this audit with months worth of inquiries and hearings on compliance measures. They need to do away with the Division of Emergency Management, federal grants be damned.”

Officials at the Department of Public Safety initially indicated they would make computer files available to us showing how the Silver State had spent its homeland security grants since 2001 after we requested the information. But the promised files never arrived, and follow-up inquiries didn’t help. Many of the state’s grant spending details are also still in voluminous paper documents, which are difficult to navigate compared with spreadsheets of spending, an issue we encountered elsewhere in the United States.

Officials at the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency turned over fairly detailed Excel spreadsheets listing anti-terrorism grant transactions containing the type of equipment purchased, how much it cost, who bought it and more. You can download the records here, but they’re limited to a five-year period. Since states are reimbursed with grant funds after first buying homeland security equipment and services with their own money, local communities often don’t actually receive the cash until long after awards are announced.

In Nebraska’s tiny Arthur County, where the estimated population in 2008 was just 338, a local sheriff bought ballistic body armor and $1,900 worth of motion detectors. Eleven of Nebraska’s counties, in fact, have fewer than 1,000 residents, according to census figures, but the state has nonetheless received tens of millions of dollars in grants since 2001. Vote-conscious members of Congress have sought to ensure everyone is eligible to receive at least a base amount regardless of population or other factors such as vulnerability.

In Nebraska’s Keith County there are fewer than 9,000 people, but local officials using 2004 grants scooped up thousands of dollars in scuba gear including wet suits, full-face masks costing $4,600 each, knives, thermal garments, underwater lights and more, all listed as response equipment for threats posed by nuclear, biological and radiological agents.

A water department in the Village of Potter with 397 residents needed eight surveillance cameras at a cost of $4,500, and larger Columbus, Neb., acquired a $28,000 hazardous materials response-vehicle. The Columbus Fire Department also boasted in 2008 that FEMA had awarded it $500,000 for a “state-of-the-art, 48-foot long fire training trailer that allows live-fire, gas-fueled training in a safe and environmentally sound manner.”

Nebraska’s biggest city, Omaha, bought a $141,000 bomb robot, 30 sophisticated radio headsets at a price of $632 each and a $17,000 public-address system for a police department helicopter. The sheriff’s office in Douglas County where Omaha is situated used grant funds for $115,000 worth of X-ray machines to enhance building security. Hundreds more listings are contained in the files.

Detractors have called homeland security grants a new variety of government pork used by lawmakers to woo constituents, and the Cornhusker State’s congressional delegation hasn’t labored to prove them wrong. Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska complained in early 2009 that the legally mandated minimum in anti-terrorism grants his home state was entitled to had been unjustly reduced for the year by the Department of Homeland Security to the tune of $464,000.

In a press release, Nelson characterized the cuts as an issue of big-city elitism:

“Those of us who have fought long and hard for a minimum level of fairness in these grant formulas are not about to sit idly by while the department rewrites the rulebook to the detriment of small, rural states. … This isn’t the first time I’ve run into problems with this agency. Last year, I took them to task when they eliminated Omaha’s right to even apply for homeland security funding under the Urban Area Security Initiative. They arbitrarily shut our largest city out of the process and it took a fight to get them to change the decision. There appears to be a bureaucratic bias against states with small populations that we must always be aware of because when it comes to rural living and small states, Washington just doesn’t get it.”

The Department of Homeland Security does more than just hand out anti-terrorism funds to states. It also makes hundreds of millions of dollars available annually to firefighters for station construction projects, hiring and retaining personnel, response vehicles and protective gear.

Like other states, Montana has benefitted from the assistance. But in September of 2008, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general raised questions about $1.3 million worth of expenditures out of a $3.5 million grant awarded to the state’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation for controlling wildfires.

Auditors concluded that Montana officials didn’t possess documents needed to verify contract costs and purchases made for equipment and materials. What it turned out to be was an example of how poorly public safety authorities sometimes communicate with one another.

Montana relied heavily on other federal agencies for assistance and brokered contracts with them using grant funds. “The state experienced extreme difficulty in obtaining proper supporting documentation from these entities and had to file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain documentation from the United States Forest Service,” auditors found.

The state added that it had no authority to force anyone in the federal government to turn over detailed cost information, meaning the left hand doesn’t always know what the right one is doing. Federal officials admit that some bureaucratic hurdles surrounding the grants don’t always meet the high-intensity scenarios local emergency responders in need of aid generally face, such as a real-time blaze.

Lawmakers in Washington have appropriated $5.5 billion for three fire-related grant programs to state and local communities since 2001. There are approximately 30,000 fire departments in the United States served by an estimated 1.1 million firefighters, and as much as 72 percent of them are volunteers.

The National Fire Protection Association determined in 2006 that for many smaller communities, firefighters fail to meet the national standard of having at least four responders for an emergency call. Further, a review by the association at the time found that half of all fire engines were at least 15 years old, and 60 percent of the departments did not have enough self-contained breathing apparatuses to outfit all staffers working a shift.

During the 1990s, fire service organizations began seeking aid from the federal government in the form of grants to help offset state and local budget shortfalls and because firefighters were under greater pressure to handle new responsibilities, such as responding to medical emergencies. But the Department of Homeland Security today has no system for tracking what portion of the billions in grant funds have gone specifically to gear and training for emergency medical services, congressional investigators wrote in a fall 2009 report.

We tried to obtain records from Montana’s Disaster and Emergency Services Division showing how the Treasure State had spent federal anti-terrorism cash it’s received since 2001. But we never made it very far. Many states have not documented their grant spending in electronic form, such as a spreadsheet displaying individual transactions, which leaves only piles of paper records that are frequently too cumbersome to navigate.

However, available reports show that auditors dinged Montana in early 2008 for using $4,355 in homeland security grants to cover an employee’s relocation expenses, which officials described in response as an accident. The report also pointed to $40,000 worth of salaries and benefits charged to the grants that weren’t explained with clear paperwork.

In 2004 when anti-terrorism and readiness grants appropriated by Congress to the states had reached a multibillion-dollar height, what was then known as the House Select Committee on Homeland Security issued a scathing report that said much of the money had been spent without local recipients knowing what their emergency-response needs were.

“The lack of target goals and guidance has resulted in terrorism preparedness dollars being spent on equipment or projects of only marginal utility to homeland security,” the report said. That was an understatement. Committee investigators found that one agency paid $63,000 for a decontamination hazmat unit being kept in a crate across from the local sheriff’s office – “an expensive item for a county that does not even have a hazmat team and little, if any, critical infrastructure.”

A county official from rural Washington state admitted they purchased equipment that would likely go unused, and another from Wisconsin called the grants a “Christmas list … from a mail-order catalog.” A high school in Tennessee received $30,000 for a defibrillator to keep on site during a district basketball tournament, the committee learned. Grand Forks, N.D., had its sights on a $175,000 bomb robot, while Colchester, Vt., used $58,000 for a search-and-rescue vehicle that could bore through concrete.

Then there’s the state of Missouri. Authorities in the Show-Me State decided to spend several million dollars in homeland security cash to buy 13,000 chem-bio warfare suits costing $400 each. As the committee’s staff pointed out, that was enough personal protection “for each and every full-time law enforcement officer in the state, regardless of the type of community in which he or she works.”

Another lesser-noticed report, moreover, revealed a deeper story about Missouri’s colossal investment. Two years after the congressional findings, state auditors discovered that much of the equipment was distributed to local communities in Missouri that didn’t want or need it, in part because some of them previously owned similar gear. Others said they did not know how to assemble the suits. And in the state’s large jurisdictions of Kansas City and St. Louis, police left gas masks, gloves, boots and more unopened in their original boxes.

In addition, officials paid a consultant nearly $250,000 to study how well emergency responders across Missouri were able to communicate by radio with one another. But auditors said the state’s Emergency Management Agency was “already aware of statewide interoperability problems” leading to questions about whether or not the expense was necessary.

Preparedness authorities responded to the audit by blaming a past state government administration for not conducting formal needs assessments and promised that bringing homeland security tasks under one roof at the Missouri Department of Public Safety would fix the misplaced priorities.

That said, out of all the 50 states and Washington, D.C., Missouri’s response to our open-records request seeking detailed grant spending records in electronic form such as a spreadsheet turned out to be among the most unusual. First, the Missouri Emergency Management Agency told us that processing the request would cost $285. After the payment was made we received 22 pages of paper records containing only generic listings, e.g. “contractor services” and “other authorized equipment.”

We submitted a second request asking for entirely separate information, namely oversight documents that would show how effectively Missouri had administered its grants. This time we had to pay $211, but the state then sent the same 22 pages. A grant manager apologized and agreed to refund a portion of the charges, plus make available the additional material, but we still had not received them as of November 2009. What records have been provided by Missouri you can download here.

Issues with Missouri’s federal grant spending continued to be exposed in 2009. The Homeland Security Department’s inspector general that summer questioned $752,000 in expenditures out of $6.3 million worth of grants awarded to a search and rescue team in Missouri’s Boone County. The FEMA program covers personnel and supply costs for special task force deployments needed in the event of an emergency.

Federal auditors argued that $466,000 in spending didn’t comply with grant guidelines, and $285,000 more lacked needed documentation, such as invoices, to show how it was used. Local officials disputed some of the findings but also again pointed to previous finance staffers and said they acquired a new accounting software program as well as hired new managers.

When it comes to homeland security, the state of Mississippi has a friend in Washington. Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson hails from the state’s 2nd District and chairs the powerful House Homeland Security Committee.

A small college in Mississippi where Thompson graduated, Tougaloo, is perhaps the most notable beneficiary of his influence. Located not far north of Jackson, Miss., the area’s zip code had a population in 2000 of about 827 people.

The Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call reported in April of 2009 that Thompson was seeking a $23 million earmark to support Tougaloo’s National Institute for Education and Training. The institute already had a program for studying transportation security, which Thompson had previously enriched with millions of dollars in earmarks.

But an official at the college admitted that the latest appropriation “hasn’t been fully defined” and could say only that he knew the school’s name was associated with it. The total dollar figure nearly matched Tougaloo’s entire annual budget.

A Thompson spokesman told Roll Call that more than one institution would actually divide up the funds “to develop an engineering capacity in the region,” but little additional explanation was given. And Tougaloo, it turned out, didn’t actually offer an engineering major, according to the paper.

Just weeks before that story broke, Thompson coordinated a summit at Tougaloo titled “Doing Business with Homeland Security.” Promoted through the House committee’s Web site, major private contractors for the Department of Homeland Security were invited to send representatives to the meeting, including L-3 Communications, General Dynamics, Boeing and Accenture. Thompson’s office described it as a chance to educate small and minority-owned businesses on successfully landing government contracts.

At Jackson State University in Mississippi, the congressman helped establish a Center for the Study of Natural Disasters, Coastal Infrastructure and Emergency Management, which received a commitment from the federal government of $1 million annually over six years.

Then in June of 2009, Thompson announced in a press release that he’d secured $750,000 worth of earmarks for an emergency operations center in Port Gibson, Miss., where the population hovers around 2,000 people. The city is an immediate neighbor to Mississippi’s Hinds County. Thompson served there as a mayor and volunteer firefighter for several years before catapulting into national politics.

Hinds, for its part, suffered damage during a storm in the spring of 2008, but FEMA officials considered it too minor for former President George Bush to declare it an official disaster area, thus triggering federal financial assistance. That changed when Thompson stepped in with other public officials from Mississippi, and FEMA ultimately decided to make the funds available.

Yet Thompson as a leader of the homeland security committee, has also been a stern critic of waste at the fledgling Department of Homeland Security. In September of 2008, Thompson held a committee hearing on $15 billion worth of Bush-era programs he cast as “failed contracts.”

Investigators at the Government Accountability Office and the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general have repeatedly blasted many expensive post-9/11 investments as poorly managed, such as the Secure Border Initiative, an attempt to line America’s southwest with surveillance cameras, remote sensors and fencing to keep out undocumented immigrants.

Under Thompson, too, the committee has sought probes into a variety of homeland security issues, from airline passenger screening to possible public-health threats to general disaster readiness, among other things. In October of 2009, he questioned why the government had still not created a yard stick to reasonably measure how much $29 billion in anti-terrorism and preparedness grants distributed to states since 2001 have actually made the nation more secure.

However, Mississippi itself hasn’t set an example for the rest of the nation in using modern technology to efficiently track grant spending. Authorities there told us they had no electronic records available showing detailed grant expenditures. Everything was in hard-copy form only. So when we filed a request for information under Mississippi’s Public Records Act, the state Office of Homeland Security told us the cost would be a prohibitive $6,600, which included paying the hourly salary of an employee to Xerox documents.

The lack of Excel spreadsheets or other form of computer database to record individual grant transactions begs the question Thompson himself has been asking: How can officials track tens of millions of dollars in anti-terrorism funds by relying on a massive paper filing system?