Department of Homeland Security

Illinois officials gave $200,000 a year to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Urbana so it could seek tips from the public about terrorists possibly tampering with the food supply by poisoning pets. Authorities also claimed the hotline would help them detect disease outbreaks. After two years, however, the local SPCA learned only that macadamia nuts are dangerous for dogs.

The state’s health department in addition bought eight Ford F-350 pickups using homeland security grants. The Illinois State Police purchased a dozen Chevy Tahoe SUVs costing $30,000 each. And authorities planned to distribute across the state another 13 mobile-command vehicles packed with satellites, generators and communications equipment carrying a price tag of $230,000 a piece. But a check of odometers showed that many of the automobiles had thousands of miles on them, meaning the trucks appeared to have been used for purposes other than terrorist attacks or disasters.

Newspapers in Illinois have tracked the state’s use of federal anti-terrorism funds since Sept. 11, including a series of stories in 2005 published by suburban Chicago’s Daily Herald, which revealed the details above.

The Illinois Emergency Management Agency, an office responsible for overseeing readiness dollars, wasn’t quite thorough when we sought documents listing equipment and services paid for under a series of federal grant programs.

In response to our request filed under the state’s Freedom of Information Act, officials turned over just three pages of documents. “The agency has conducted a search of its files and has found the information included herein,” a response letter claimed. Illinois received over half-a-billion dollars in grants between 2002 and 2008.

It was possible to locate audits of the state’s grants management practices, however.

Back in 2006, auditors warned the Illinois emergency management office that its internal controls for handling cash transactions needed to improve. Financial accounts had to be reconciled correctly so there would be no inexplicable difference between grants received and money actually spent.

The following year, auditors made a similar finding. Don’t draw funds from the U.S. Treasury until you’re ready to disburse them locally, they instructed. Otherwise, you may lose track of what you have. One way the federal government hoped to ensure accountability over anti-terrorism grants was to require that local beneficiaries pay for new gas masks and helmets first with their own money before seeking reimbursement.

Okay, the state of Illinois responded, we’ll fix it.

Yet again the next year in 2008, auditors made identical complaints, and again, Illinois vowed improvements. Bookkeeping isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when planning a war on terror. But simple accounting measures are necessary to ensure good-government practices, which in turn means more money is available for investments in preparedness.

In the fourth year, auditors proved why reliable accounting practices mattered so much. This time, the Illinois Emergency Management Agency overpaid the city of Chicago $2.6 million in federal funds, because officials submitted duplicate invoices for payment they’d already been reimbursed for. It took more than three months before the state asked that the money be returned.

Aside from that pricey misstep, the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general says Illinois has performed better than other states with its homeland security grants. In October of 2008, Inspector General Richard Skinner, a watchdog of the department, pointed to the Illinois Terrorism Task Force as a “best practice” other states could adopt to make grant spending more effective.

The task force contains members of 63 different public and private organizations not just representing police and fire departments but also health care, agriculture, transportation, natural resources and education agencies. It’s the “driving force” behind all planning, funding and program execution activities, and the task force interacts to some degree almost daily.

The state’s major accomplishments include two training events, one of which was “the first large-scale pandemic flu exercise ever conducted,” the foundation for a statewide interoperable communications system and the creation of 18 teaching centers for emergency responders.

“As a result, the state has made significant progress in achieving statewide goals and objectives under the State Homeland Security Grant Program,” Skinner’s office stated in a report. “Because of the Illinois Task Force approach, the state did not experience many of the program weaknesses we identified during our audits of homeland security grant programs in other states.” Those problems included poor equipment safeguards, purchases that were unneeded and a lack of goals to justify expenditures.

Still, plenty of fundamental questions can be raised in every state about where the money’s gone.

The Herald newspaper also pointed to a treadmill costing $4,600 that a rural fire protection district in Illinois purchased. The clerk’s office in Kane County spent $37,000 to install surveillance cameras, not to identify terrorists but for employees who complained that their cars were being vandalized.

Staffers from Inspector General Skinner’s office had some concerns, too. One state agency responsible for distributing grants to fire departments across Illinois didn’t have a central inventory system to “to control and account for millions of dollars in equipment and other personal property.” Federal auditors also wanted Illinois to better-track equipment with a limited shelf life, like gas masks, which if used past their expiration date can pose a danger to emergency responders.

The state of Idaho produced a lengthy spreadsheet and other documents in response to a request submitted under the state’s open-records law for information about its anti-terrorism grant spending. While the information is not as detailed as we would have preferred, readers can still view spending activity by county, cost of the equipment purchased, year it was acquired and more. The file is available here along with the additional records supplied by the state.

Idaho’s Bureau of Homeland Security did a better job than most states of making material available. In a number of cases, states responded that they weren’t tracking purchases in any electronic format at all, such as a spreadsheet. They only had piles of paper documents to verify expenditures.

That’s telling since state agencies responsible for policing the grants may not be able to determine quickly for oversight and planning purposes which community purchased gas masks or new emergency radios in previous years.

There were still limitations in Idaho’s records, however. Ada County in the southwestern section of the state where the capital is located spent $40,000 during 2003 on what were described in the data we received only as “body bags.” The entire state, in fact, used approximately $1.8 million to buy “body bags” between the years 2003 and 2007, according to our analysis. Officials later told us that category actually included other types of mass casualty gear like triage tarps, bandages and stethoscopes. “This has led to a skewing of the category,” spokesman Robert Feeley said.

Another $6.3 million went toward personal protective equipment, such as gas masks and special suits to safeguard first responders against dangerous biological substances. But the details aren’t vivid enough in the records to determine quantity and the specific types of gear. Some expenditures are listed merely as “other authorized equipment” or “intervention equipment” without additional explanation.

Authorities in Idaho spent another $3.4 million on vehicles equipped with tools for defeating or protecting against attacks involving CBRNE, a common acronym in emergency preparedness circles meaning chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive devices.

The state’s smallest county, Clark, population 910, received nearly $600,000 in anti-terrorism grants during the years immediately following Sept. 11 when appropriations from Congress reached a peak. Clark County officials spent more than $20,000 on “body bags.” Another $10,000 paid for “explosive device mitigation and remediation equipment,” while $73,000 was spent on protective gear for firefighters and paramedics.

The data also show that communities in Idaho purchased at least $24.7 million worth of interoperable communications equipment, a major post-Sept. 11 priority for emergency personnel and policymakers who want to make it easier for police and firefighters to communicate with one another. Such improved radio systems are extremely expensive, however. Half of Clark County’s grant expenditures, for instance, covered new investments in public safety communications.

In addition to grant spending data, the state turned over to us regular progress reports it’s required to complete under federal guidelines as part of a substantial amount of government paperwork tied to the funding. The forms are supposed to indicate how well a state is meeting its strategic homeland security goals and objectives.

Those documents show that among other things, Idaho spent $41,000 assessing the vulnerability of and protecting a distribution center owned by Albertsons Foods, the national grocery retailer. “Terrorism directed towards the headquarters facility could negatively impact the company’s ability to distribute food goods nationwide,” according to the records, many of which are redacted for what the state called security reasons.

A daily newspaper covering the Twin Falls area in 2006 criticized Idaho cities and towns for “raking in far more money than they deserve in fighting terror,” arguing that the state is not a front line of the war against violent extremists.

But local first responders also told the Idaho Statesman that the capital city of Boise now has a search-and-rescue team that can free victims from a collapsed building. The closest such capabilities previously existed only in Salt Lake City, more than 300 miles away.

Flying on a commercial airliner changed forever after Sept. 11, and travelers have grown accustomed to the greatly enhanced security measures implemented since the hijackings, including thousands of new screeners hired by the fledgling Transportation Security Administration to search passengers and bags for dangerous items.

The last worry anyone wants now is that the very people in charge of making travelers feel secure have themselves become perpetrators of crime.

But that’s what happened in 2006 when two former TSA employees working at Honolulu’s International Airport in Hawaii pleaded guilty to stealing money from the luggage of Japanese tourists. One took cash on four occasions in the form of Japanese yen that totaled $4,800, while another stole $10,000 over eight incidents.

They also admitted to being part of a larger group of passenger screeners at the airport who stole money from the baggage of international travelers and divided it up among themselves. As part of their sentencing, one employee was forced to attend Gamblers Anonymous meetings and a judge directed the second to enter a mental health program, “which may include anger management classes,” according to court records.

In another case that year, a TSA screener at the Molokai Airport in Hoolehua, Hawaii, confessed to stealing $16,000 in cash from a passenger’s backpack. The man was sentenced to three months in prison and three years of supervised release after being caught.

Our effort to obtain records from Hawaii – notorious for its poor commitment to open government – showing how the state has used its homeland security grants since 2001 failed. In fact, Hawaii during this project became one of the worst of the 50 states and Washington, D.C. in making such documents available.

More than a year after we sent a formal request under Hawaii’s Uniform Information Practices Act, the state finally provided an anemic spreadsheet that listed grant expenditures between 1999 and 2006 by general category, e.g. “law enforcement” and “hazardous materials,” but it does little to show how the money was actually used. It’s nonetheless available for download below.

A grant manager from the Hawaii State Civil Defense office first asked several questions about why we were requesting the information and then said the office needed time to determine how best to provide us with the data. But follow-up calls and e-mails led to disappointment.

News accounts and other publicly available documents do offer some idea of how Hawaii spent its anti-terrorism funds. The state awarded a $1 million contract in July of 2009 to a Texas-based emergency preparedness company for researching and developing an influenza-pandemic response plan amid fears over the spread of the swine-flu virus.

Federal cash in 2008 enabled a police department in Hawaii County to spend $344,000 on laptops and software for its patrol cars so officers could access databases of criminal records on the beat. While the system has obvious everyday applications, one official called it a perfect example of how grants can help local law enforcement “enhance homeland defense.”

A few months before that, county police spent $240,000 in grants on a four-wheel drive, 19,000-pound armored BearCat vehicle with radiation and methane gas detectors on board for use by its Special Response Team. The truck is deployed for executing high-risk search warrants, according to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and is accompanied on missions by a $330,000 mobile-command post the department purchased with homeland-security money in 2004. City and county police had to burrow military armored trucks in the past, the paper reported.

Hawaii, a leading grant recipient per capita, received nearly $5 million in 2008, or twice what it did the year before, from just one infrastructure protection grant that it planned to spend on better defense measures for buses and security improvements at the state’s harbors and ports, according to the Star-Bulletin.

A 2009 state audit found that Hawaii’s Department of Public Safety violated local and federal guidelines by not recording or entering into an inventory system $334,000 worth of equipment bought with grants. Auditors warned that the failure could jeopardize future funding.

Attempts to learn more about how the state of Georgia has spent its homeland security grants since 2001 turned out to be an exercise in frustration. First we were told that sections of the documents, such as equipment lists and progress reports, would not be disclosed due to a provision of the Georgia Open Records Act that exempts:

“Any document relating to the existence, nature, location, or function of security devices designed to protect against terrorist or other attacks, which devices depend for their effectiveness in whole or in part upon a lack of general public knowledge.”

In other words, the less citizens know, the safer they are. Georgia would make the records available to us, but we’d have to cover the cost of labor needed to black out sections of the paperwork for the public’s own protection. That charge, officials told us, would be $4,785.

The cost would include paying a budget analyst for 56 hours of work totaling more than $1,000. We also would have to pay $46 an hour for processing work done by Georgia’s homeland security deputy director, $42 an hour more for the terrorism division director and $33 an hour for the assistant terrorism division director.

While committed to this project, paying nearly $5,000 was too much for us to afford. We subsequently learned through a report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general that Georgia kept track of its grant purchases in convenient spreadsheets the state may be able to send cheaply in an e-mail or CD-ROM, rather than charging for the cost of Xeroxing 5,000 pieces of paper.

But again the state responded that expensive redactions would need to be made of the information for security reasons.

Searching for an alternative, we exchanged several e-mails and phone calls with the state over a period of three months. A public affairs official with the Georgia Emergency Management Agency offered to send samples of spending for a few counties that might indicate trends in how the state used its grants, but that wouldn’t tell us enough.

We sought financial and performance audits, in particular reports from so-called “site visits” state authorities must make to cities and counties as part of their oversight responsibilities to verify that new preparedness equipment and spending records are all accounted for.

Such material might have helped us zero in on misspending while not revealing sensitive details about the state’s critical infrastructure or public safety practices. Those, too, fell under legal exemptions for sensitive information, we were told.

In the end, Georgia did provide spreadsheets and a two-page PDF that listed grant awards from 1999 to 2007 by local jurisdiction. The records also give a “general description” of projects funded with anti-terrorism cash. You can view them here.

For example, the fire department in Carrollton, Ga., population 23,291, bought a $280,000 hazardous-materials truck. The City of Hartwell’s police department, which serves a community of about 4,300 residents, spent more than $15,000 in 2003 on a night-vision device and bomb-suppression blanket. Tifton, Ga., a town of about 17,300, paid $94,000 for a mobile-command vehicle, portable radios, physical security barriers, “crowd-control devices” and more.

Even if obtaining more detailed spending information wasn’t possible without the state charging thousands of dollars for it, there are publicly available documents that offer a portrait of Georgia’s grant spending practices.

When emergency communications systems aren’t compatible with one another, such as between a police and fire department, officials sometimes need to swap radios at the scene of a disaster or even seek out a land line to request assistance from another area.

Making those systems interoperable and thus more convenient has been a leading post-Sept. 11 initiative. Between 2003 and 2007, the federal government awarded Georgia more than $100 million through various grant programs for communities and state agencies to invest in new radio projects.

But in some instances, the state actually took a step backwards. One jurisdiction might upgrade its radio system while a neighbor didn’t, meaning communities that could previously contact each other lost the ability, according to a Sept. 2008 report from the state’s Department of Audits and Accounts. The same thing happened when regional shared systems were created if one city couldn’t afford to join.

There was no single office in Georgia responsible for promoting interoperability, according to auditors, and state agencies don’t cooperate in making large-volume purchases of equipment that could save taxpayer money. One group of local officials working toward a seamless system complained that a private contractor was selling incompatible radio equipment to a nearby jurisdiction “knowing it would have a negative impact on their project.”

A system maintained by the Georgia State Patrol provided limited interoperability by connecting computer servers in 81 dispatch centers. It was funded in part by $11 million in federal grants, but auditors revealed that intended local beneficiaries “were unfamiliar with the system and unclear as to how or when the system could be used, even months after installation.”

State patrol officials answered the report by saying they were working on a user manual and personnel would provide on-site training and promotion locally of the interoperability network. They also argued that the system needed to be built out first with available dollars, while training based on actual scenarios would occur later. We’re posting the Georgia Department of Public Safety’s full response to the audit here for the first time.

Florida is a leading recipient of homeland security grants in the United States due to its significant population and major tourist attractions. And it’s received hundreds of millions of dollars over the years to recover from various disasters, namely hurricanes that pummeled the state’s coastline.

Despite experience in managing sudden infusions of needed federal support, Florida still struggles to comply with guidelines regulating Public Assistance grants that are used to assist communities in the wake of catastrophe.

In fact, auditors took the extreme step in 2009 of declaring that they couldn’t render an opinion on whether the state followed certain grant rules because a computer system used to track dollars distributed across Florida contained “deficiencies” that made its contents unreliable as a source of information.

A March 2009 report also pointed to a “significant number of instances” in which the Florida Division of Emergency Management made aid payments to local recipients without enough documentation to show the costs were allowable and reasonable. The state didn’t carry out final inspections to ensure promised rehabilitation projects were actually done before cash from federal coffers was provided to cover expenses.

Auditors questioned millions of dollars in payments because, among other things, documents weren’t available showing what tasks had been completed, from a $700,000 window project that had no otherwise clear explanation to book shelves costing more than $10,000 that an earlier estimate said should have been about $2,000 with no reason provided for the difference.

As for homeland security grants, auditors also determined in early 2009 that $2.6 million, or a quarter of the spending sampled for compliance with guidelines, weren’t supported by documents the state needed in order to justify them, such as invoices. Florida’s Department of Law Enforcement promised to improve record keeping in response to the audit.

That finding was among several others noted by auditors – some of which have come up repeatedly in reports from past years – that questioned the ability of both the Division of Emergency Management and the state police to properly oversee tens of millions of dollars in homeland security grants Florida has benefitted from since 2001. Much of the criticism overlaps into the state’s use of federal disaster assistance.

On the other hand, Florida has faced some of the most devastating storms in its history during the last half-decade, and disarray to a degree is to be expected. Four hurricanes slammed into the state in 2004 leaving 117 dead and one-fifth of its homes damaged. The first caused approximately $14 billion in destruction.

The following year Hurricane Katrina struck land and became the most devastating natural disaster in U.S. history. While the storm didn’t create the havoc it did in New Orleans, a dozen people were killed and the Sunshine State sustained heavy floods.

When auditors visited in 2007, state officials had not done final inspections for thousands of large disaster recovery projects worth $50,000 or more each to make sure the work was satisfactory and eligible under federal guidelines. Authorities responded that they had 50 vacant positions for such duties, which couldn’t be filled until FEMA provided cash to cover them.

FEMA, for its part, didn’t anticipate completion of the inspections until 2032 if the progress rate at the time continued, according to a report. The state still had nearly 3,000 open projects as of early 2009, some of which were from older storms that occurred up to 10 years ago.

Oversight lapses aside, President Barack Obama when he took office chose a top disaster official from Florida to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency, an appointment observed closely since its former director under George Bush was viewed as poorly credentialed and incapable of handling the response to Katrina.

The selection of Craig Fugate elicited wide applause. Although a Democrat, he enjoyed support from two Republican Florida governors in a key position where he was given considerable latitude to make decisions. The Miami Herald described Fugate as a man “known for plain talk and a direct manner” who once said in a job interview when asked his weakness: “I don’t suffer fools.” Fugate helmed the state’s emergency management office through its record-breaking storm seasons of 2004 and 2005.

There’s more about Florida’s homeland security apparatus that makes it unique compared to other states. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement was among the first police agencies in the nation after Sept. 11 to embrace controversial data-mining techniques that involve sifting through large volumes of potentially sensitive personal information, such as credit histories and records of purchasing habits. Authorities believe it could lead them to terrorism suspects planning an attack.

Civil libertarians counter that privacy laws designed to protect American citizens from intrusion by the government will wither in a new era of technology where personal data can be digitally preserved and mined for leads. Worse, an innocent person may be wrongly branded a terrorist.

Seisint Inc., a company that processes vast oceans of consumer data for marketers, developed the so-called Matrix system for Florida law enforcement. But federal funds supporting the program were yanked in 2005 due to outcry.

Reporter Robert O’Harrow of the Washington Post, who’s also an advisor to the Center for Investigative Reporting, described the rise and fall of Matrix in his 2005 book on privacy in the 21st century, No Place to Hide. His account included an interview with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s own intelligence director who said of Matrix: “It’s scary. I can call up everything about you, your pictures and pictures of your neighbors.”

The department supplied us with some details on hundreds of purchases made using federal homeland-security grants between 2005 and 2007. The documents were disclosed in response to a public-records request, but a critical area of the records that lists services provided by private contractors is blacked out. Other states have made similar redactions when turning over grant-spending records to us citing security concerns. Brief project titles are included, however.

The spending reports show that Florida police in recent years paid at least $1 million to LexisNexis, another company that collects and bundles details about individuals, for a “query tool” that can search both personal data and law-enforcement documents. LexisNexis purchased Seisint for $775 million in 2004.

In response to an open-records request asking for information about the state of Delaware’s anti-terrorism grant spending, a public information officer at the Department of Safety and Homeland Security provided just seven pages of information after consulting with government lawyers.

A handful of states told us their open-government laws allowed information considered “security-sensitive” to be exempt from disclosure arguing that they could be vulnerable if terrorists knew the type of equipment used for emergency preparedness.

The details Delaware supplied are slim and don’t come close to the spreadsheets made available by some other states that list each piece of equipment purchased, the quantity, how much it cost and more. But they nonetheless offer some insight.

One document from Delaware, available for download below, is a list of $10 million worth of specialized emergency-response vehicles purchased by communities across the state, a popular item that also topped wish lists elsewhere around the country.

The vehicles include mobile-command trucks, which can cost more than half-a-million dollars each and are stuffed with pricey communications equipment, plasma monitors, conference rooms and biological-detection devices, among other things.

Wilmington, Del., snapped up three of them, plus a $345,000 boat, records show. The Belvedere Volunteer Fire Company paid for a $377,000 hazardous-materials response truck with a trailer attached, while the state’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control spent more than $600,000 on similar equipment.

The police department in Wilmington and the Delaware State Police each bought $191,000 “special operations vehicles” from Massachusetts-based Lenco Industries, Inc., a company that builds armored units.

Another document lists the state’s grant spending by category, such as training and administrative costs, but an overwhelming majority of the money went toward equipment purchases.

Readers can also see break downs of how much each Delaware community has received in grants as of 2007. Recipients are required to use local funds for purchases before being reimbursed with the grants, which means as many as three years can pass before federal cash is actually delivered to a grantee.

While state officials were reluctant to provide specific information about spending, publicly accessible audits show Delaware has had trouble in past years verifying some of its expenditures. Repeatedly auditors questioned hundreds of thousands of dollars in personnel costs, because the state didn’t show how employees paid with the grants carried out work tied to their anti-terrorism and preparedness purpose.

The federal government is strict about such guidelines so states don’t try to save their own money by covering salaries and benefits for workers not performing homeland security-related tasks. State officials promised to better document work hours in response.

When historians look back on the early part of the 21st century, they may be tempted to attribute the phrase “homeland security” and its patriotic connotation to former president George W. Bush. But the movement to create a Department of Homeland Security began when Bush was still governor of Texas.

In 1998, a commission chaired by two former senators, Democrat Gary Hart and Republican Warren Rudman, examined the direction of U.S. national security after the Cold War. It concluded that the bewildering web of agencies scattered across the federal government responsible for national security – from border protection to domestic preparedness – needed to be consolidated into a single federal agency.

A Republican congressman from Texas, Mac Thornberry, answered the call by introducing legislation months before Sept. 11 that would have paved the way for the new agency. The bill stalled without much attention – until the attacks.

Then, one of the nation’s most prominent policymakers, hailing from Connecticut, helped pressure Bush’s White House into creating the sprawling DHS bureaucracy.

Weeks after 9/11, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, then a Democrat, sponsored the formation of what he then called the Department of National Homeland Security. It didn’t evolve into a real cabinet-level agency until the following year resulting in the most dramatic overhaul of the federal government since Harry Truman formed the Department of Defense in 1947.

“In my career in public service, I have never before seen disorganization so consequential and the case for change so compelling,” Lieberman wrote in a Sept. 2002 Washington Post op-ed during debate over the establishment of a homeland security department.

Despite Lieberman’s notable role, the state of Connecticut isn’t above the same grant management problems other states have faced with anti-terrorism cash. Auditors last year raised questions about $2 million in spending from a pair of federal programs used by Connecticut’s Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management to pay administrative staffers for preparedness planning and other activities.

The state couldn’t prove those employees were performing work linked to the actual purpose of the grants, a key requirement designed to prevent local governments from simply shifting everyday payroll costs on to the feds. Connecticut officials promised they would do more to demonstrate that salaries and fringe benefits covered with federal money were for grant-related work.

They’d made identical assurances the year before, however.

Our attempt to obtain detailed grant spending records from Connecticut officials was moderately successful. The only computer file made available in electronic format showed individual purchases the state made on behalf of local communities between 2005 and 2009. A spokeswoman said the Excel spreadsheet, which you can download below, represents about 60 percent of Connecticut’s total expenditures during that period, but it doesn’t list equipment prices. Remaining information in the state’s possession is mostly limited to paper records.

Lieberman now chairs the powerful Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which oversaw the new federal department’s birth. His promise that multiple agencies in charge of securing the nation would operate seamlessly and efficiently alongside one another has been compromised by contract boondoggles, legacy law enforcement offices that continue to quarrel, low employee morale and frequent allegations of corruption among agents guarding the southwest border with Mexico.

Policymakers on the committee representing small states, including Lieberman, have stubbornly clashed over funding priorities with the likes of California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who argues that homeland security grants should be distributed based on where threats are likelier to exist. On a per-capita basis, states such as Connecticut frequently outpace New York, California and others in total cash received irking critics who have called the spending pork.

The committee also set off on a shaky start when for nearly two years it held up the full appointment of former Inspector General Clark Ervin, a critical watchdog over the Department of Homeland Security’s spending and operations.

Ervin became an outspoken antagonist of the committee, as well as the department’s leadership, and aggressively exposed wasteful contracts and security lapses. Lieberman refused repeated meeting invitations to discuss his work, Ervin revealed in a 2006 book about his experience, Open Target: Where America is Vulnerable to Attack.

“I’m no seer, and I’m no genius,” he wrote, “but it did not take much foresight or insight to see that this new agency, with billions of dollars to spend, under tight congressional deadlines and immense political pressure to do something as quickly as possible to make the homeland more secure, would be targeted by rapacious contractors like buzzards homing in on carrion.”

The Bush White House declined to reappoint Ervin in late 2004.

A 30-foot trailer costing $54,000 in Hinsdale County, Colo., “did not appear to have been used” four years after it was purchased with federal grants. New mobile radios sat in storage there for nearly a year. A set of night-vision goggles went missing and has never been relocated.

Elsewhere, the city of Denver overlooked a check for $1 million worth of homeland security funds, which sat in an abandoned mailbox due to a dysfunctional accounting system relied upon by the local Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security.

Denver also used federal grants to buy refrigerator magnets, baseball caps, pens and more totaling over $35,000 for its “Ready Colorado” campaign, but guidelines didn’t allow such promotional items, inspectors concluded.

Those findings were contained in documents the Colorado Governor’s Office of Homeland Security turned over in response to an open-records request. State officials are responsible for visiting local communities and checking up on homeland-security grant purchases to make sure federal rules are being followed. They did the site monitoring between 2008 and 2009.

Local authorities responded by vowing to fix any problems identified. Hinsdale promised that its gear would be properly accounted for and deployed. The city of Denver’s emergency management office blamed bookkeeping problems on a past administrator and said it’s since made improvements. Officials said the Department of Homeland Security later decided the promotional expenses were permissible. They also told us Hinsdale was completing a larger radio investment before deploying those devices.

But issues with handling homeland security grants are nothing new for Colorado. It received multiple scathing reports from auditors over the last several years that made the state a national example of sloppy government management.

In early 2008, Gov. Bill Ritter was forced to create a new cabinet-level Office of Homeland Security to clean up the system citing the state’s poor oversight of federal cash. The fledgling office is nonetheless housed today in the state’s Multi-Agency Coordination Center, itself an emblem of Colorado’s past performance with anti-terrorism grant spending.

Grant funds totaling $1.5 million had to be returned to the federal government after auditors in 2006 questioned a “less than transparent series of transactions” involving the state’s Department of Local Affairs, then responsible for distributing homeland security grants in Colorado. The state agency had used a complex scheme to benefit itself and obtain administrative office space at the coordination center using money that was in fact designated for other uses.

A report from auditors that year criticized numerous other expenditures. More than $230,000 had been used to cover overhead expenses that weren’t allowed, including custodial services and the cost of utilities. Another $38,000 was spent to buy a passenger bus, and $46,000 went to an ineligible weapons training simulation system. One local grantee couldn’t produce documents showing how it spent $331,000 when auditors arrived because records “were incomplete and in disarray.” It took six months to verify that spending.

Then in 2007 the federal Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, Richard Skinner, had his own look at Colorado’s use of anti-terrorism money. A phone system contained in an incident command vehicle paid for with homeland security funds didn’t work, but the manufacturer wasn’t contacted by local officials to fix the problem while it was still under warranty, Skinner’s staff found.

Radiation detectors and a decontamination tent were in their original boxes months after being purchased. Nearly $8 million in spending was questioned by Skinner due to charges that didn’t appear to comply with federal regulations.

Yet another performance report that year examined Colorado’s $135 million campaign to improve radio communications between police, firefighters, paramedics and other officials. Tens of millions of dollars for the project have come from readiness grants. Interoperability, as experts call it, is a major post-9/11 initiative and vast sums of money have been sunk into such efforts nationally. The report found that despite spending so much, Colorado couldn’t assess the extent to which statewide communications had improved.

We were able to retrieve 80 pages worth of monitoring reports from the governor’s office in PDF form, and you can download them below.

But our attempts to obtain additional records detailing individual grant expenditures by city or county in an easy-to-access computer file such as a spreadsheet were less successful. They’ve only been maintained in voluminous hard-copy records, which were too impractical for us to pursue, a problem that occurred with other states. Officials in Colorado also told us that time-consuming redactions of some security-sensitive information may be necessary. The state did recently begin using an Oracle database to track future grants, however, said program manager Deanna Erstad.

The Golden State is a leading recipient of anti-terrorism grants in the country due to its population, major attractions and powerful political representatives. At least $1.9 billion from major grant programs poured into the California between 2003 and 2009.

State auditors in a Sept. 2006 report called California’s structure for emergency response a bewildering “labyrinth of committees, advisory bodies, and state and local agencies.” Despite threats posed by earthquakes, wildfires and 9/11, one entity responsible for advising the governor on preparedness issues, the California Emergency Council, hadn’t bothered to meet for four years, auditors found.

Lawmakers in Sacramento only recently established the California Emergency Management Agency to help consolidate responsibilities long after complaints that the existence of multiple offices fostered confusion among emergency responders and local communities applying for federal funds.

Earlier this year we decided to take a closer look at California’s grant spending and submitted an open-records request to state authorities asking for all performance reports that might show how well cities and counties had managed their anti-terrorism grants. We received hundreds of pages of so-called monitoring reports produced by state officials who are responsible for visiting local grantees to inspect purchased equipment and make sure records supporting expenditures are in place.

The result was a story circulated with the help of more than two-dozen news organizations across California on the anniversary of Sept. 11 that detailed several problems. Madera County, Calif., couldn’t produce for inspectors adequate paperwork proving how it spent $1.4 million. Officials there told the state that records needed to verify more than $279,000 in spending may have been “inadvertently destroyed.”

Poor accounting systems led other communities to overcharge the government for grant purchases, including $92,000 that had to be paid back by the city of Oakland. Placer County spent $47,000 on a computer software program for a local police department that wasn’t used. Another county attempted to buy a lawn mower with grant cash, and a university campus police department purchased a $2,300 plasma TV.

The story package included an interactive map that enabled visitors to click on their county, see how much the area had received in major grants and view a list of top purchases, from chemical-resistant gloves in Inyo County to ballistic body armor in Butte County. We also showcased a selection of photographs depicting purchased equipment and explained what emergency personnel used it for.

An accompanying story profiled one southern California company that specialized in building incident-command vehicles for which there was a high demand after Sept. 11 by police and fire departments flush with grant funds. At the height of the homeland security boom, Mattman Specialty Vehicles defied the seemingly impossible and went bankrupt in 2006 leaving some communities with half-finished trucks and lost deposits.

California officials only began carrying out site inspections years after the fact, which meant many problems that occurred with grant spending at the local level were allowed to languish before eventually being uncovered.

Despite improvements in oversight, however, auditors found in 2009 that the state had still failed to properly monitor another $28.7 million in federal funds awarded to California through a program designed to help communities pay for reconstruction and debris removal following presidentially declared disasters. As it has in the past, California blamed staffing shortages but promised to begin looking more closely at its disaster-recovery projects.

Authorities in Arkansas responded to an open-government request with richly detailed spreadsheets listing the state’s homeland security grant purchases by community, number of equipment items, brand name, price and more. The individual Excel files are available for download below. Use the tabs contained in each one to see expenditures by grant year and program.

Here are some of the things you’ll find by doing so: The city of Little Rock spent $13,000 on two Segway scooters, Fulton County purchased seven pairs of binoculars for $500 each and Benton County bought six night-vision devices costing $3,200 a piece.

Hope, Ark., became a symbol of the federal government’s ineptitude in the catastrophic wake of Hurricane Katrina. Months after the storm struck land, more than 12,000 manufactured homes built as shelter for evacuees sat empty there on an airport tarmac.

The Department of Homeland Security, it turned out, had spent $850 million purchasing the structures, on top of the hefty expense required to maintain them long term. During April of 2006, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee convened a special hearing in Hope and demanded to know what went wrong.

Inspector General Richard Skinner, an independent overseer of the department, told policymakers at the meeting that FEMA’s ill-conceived disaster response resulted in far more units being bought than needed and that millions of additional dollars were wasted after clearing locations for the homes that turned out to be unsuitable due to contamination and other reasons.

Making matters worse, Skinner said, the actual style of units purchased couldn’t be deployed in flood plains, meaning much of Louisiana and Mississippi. Some of the structures were damaged by contractors during delivery, and others began warping after being stored improperly.

“The federal government, in particular FEMA, has received widespread criticism for a slow and ineffective response [to the 2005 hurricane season],” Skinner testified. “Unfortunately, as my testimony today articulates, much of the criticism is warranted.”

The temporary housing mess after Katrina continued to be a problem years later, and Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas sponsored a bill in 2009 aimed at forcing FEMA to address the surplus. According to Pryor’s office, the agency continues to pay $125 million annually just to keep in place 120,000 manufactured houses, many of which are newer units purchased since Katrina for possible future disaster victims beyond what already existed.

But the federal government estimated in June of 2008 that the overwhelming majority of them were actually unusable, either because they could not be equipped for habitation quickly enough, dangerously high formaldehyde levels existed in the units or substantial decay had set in. The FEMA Accountability Act proposed by Pryor would require that the agency sell, transfer or dispose of what it doesn’t plan to keep.

Otherwise, our review of available audit documents covering anti-terrorism grant spending in Arkansas didn’t reveal significant findings in terms of how the funds were managed by state officials. But reviewing purchases using the files uploaded here still enables readers to see just what types of investments were made by their community. Are they reasonable and seem to suit the emergency-preparedness needs of your area? Have a look for yourself.