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Headnote

The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, posed a set of security challenges for the nations cities that the increasingly decentralized federal system was poorly prepared to meet. Although it was generally agreed that domestic security required a close intergovernmental partnership, strong national leadership and support were lacking in creating and guiding this partnership. To make matters more difficult, political considerations in Congress generally trumped the assessment of security risks in the distribution of federal fiscal aid. This article explores the strains in the intergovernmental homeland security partnership, their causes, and efforts to adapt and reform. Despite some progress toward a more rational public administration of homeland security, the partnership still reflects the deficiencies of imperfect federalism.

The terror attacks of 9/11 exposed a federal system that was ill-prepared to craft and implement a coherent program to protect the nation's cities. Although the national government was able to mount an effective military campaign in Afghanistan less than a month after the attacks, putting in place a program for domestic security that brought expertise to bear, allocated responsibilities, and shared costs fairly posed a set of challenges to the complex, decentralized division of functions among levels of government that had evolved over the prior three decades.

National security is a fundamental responsibility of the central government, but given the nature of terrorism as a highly localized phenomenon, the homeland aspect of the war against terror requires a close, cooperative intergovernmental partnership. During the first three years after the terror attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., however, strong and clear national leadership was lacking in certain crucial areas, creating an aura of uncertainty and frustration at the state and local levels. Furthermore, Congress often seemed propelled more by political considerations, seeking to fashion a partnership, than by security concerns. Finally, the local government partners in particular were made to bear heavy fiscal, administrative, and decision-making burdens that, according to many local officials, stretched and often exceeded their resources and capabilities. The result was a partnership marked by substantial strains rather than a sense of unity of purpose in the face of external threat.

Although questions remain about the focus of national leadership, as well as the nature of local capabilities, priorities, and readiness along the first line of defense against terror, the federal partnership has shown a certain resilient, though perhaps limited capacity to adapt, change, and improve. These limits suggest that the case of homeland security raises questions about the costs and challenges of protecting American towns and cities through the loose arrangement of a highly decentralized federal partnership.

The Intergovernmental System at the Moment of 9/11

When the terror attacks occurred on September 11, 2001, Washington's relations with the nations cities had traced an arc from the assertion of a broadranging national interest in the state of urban America and the rapidly expanding fiscal assistance that accompanied it during the heyday of the Great Society programs to what Pietro Nivola has called the era of "tense commandments"-the conjunction of a growing body of federal mandates imposed on state and local government administrative practices, coupled with diminished intergovernmental aid (Nivola 2002). Deaf to the fiscal crisis talcing hold in the states and diffident toward the cities and their problems, the federal government in 2001 was no longer predisposed or well-positioned to lead and support a close intergovernmental partnership (Behn and Keating 2004).

The repudiation of the Great Society model of intense federal involvement in urban affairs, programmatically and fiscally, began with President Richard M. Nixon's efforts to devolve responsibilities to local government through block grants (Conlan 1998). This devolution, which continued during the Reagan and Clinton years, signaled a diminution of federal interest in urban problems (Eisinger 1998). But paradoxically, this trend coexisted with an explosion of unfunded mandates as Washington sought increasingly to "dabble in the minutiae of education programs, municipal staffing practices ... and other issues customarily of local interest" (Nivola 2002, 155). Thus, at the turn of the new century, there was some confusion as to the proper scope and nature of national and subnational roles. Was it Washington's role to be an administrative standard setter but not a fiscal supporter for local government? Was the local role to adjust to this new era of fiscal self-reliance, as long as local governments met federal standards in running their schools and treating wastewater and hiring the disabled? Would Washington no longer take on the responsibility of articulating the grand goals of the good (or great) society or enlist cities in the march toward its realization?

After 9/11, as Nivola observes, the federal government was at a crossroads. Homeland security seemed to demand a strong, central guiding and supportive presence, but Washington had long since eschewed such a role in favor of devolution. Local and state governments, more and more on their own fiscally, were reluctant partners in the implementation of federal standards-most recently, for example, with regard to the No Child Left Behind education reform (Greenblatt 2004). Homeland security required a different mind-set from all parties.

The Expectation of a Security Partnership

There is a general and unquestioned expectation in the United States that in times of major crisis, responsibility for mobilizing a response falls to Washington (Krane 2002). The obligations of the national government have always been clear in the case of foreign wars, but the challenge of foreign terrorism on American soil necessarily involves substantial new roles for subnational governments. Local governments in particular are the locus of the nation's primary law enforcement agencies, and they furnish communities with fire protection, public health services, and emergency medical personnel. "All acts of terrorism are local," observed Congressman John Tierney (D-MA) during hearings before a House subcommittee, "so each of our communities must be fully prepared in crisis response and consequence management" (U.S. Congress 2002; see also Savitch 2003).1

Nevertheless, public officials at all levels of government have recognized that local governments as first responders to acts of terror cannot be left on their own, not only because questions of national security are at stake but also because the burdens of vigilance have propelled cities and counties into areas of planning, public health, and law enforcement for which they have little preparation, inadequate resources, and no precedents. Thus, responding to terror requires a partnership among all three levels of government (DHS 2004, 15; U.S. Congress 2002). The federal role in the partnership is distinctive: Specifically, the "incremental costs of responding to the additional national security threat posed by terrorism are appropriately a federal responsibility," according to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations (2003, 10), and so, too, is the creation of a national response plan (U.S. Congress 2002). Thus, as the dimensions of the security task began to take shape, state and local governments, which had grown accustomed to running their affairs in a highly decentralized federal system, nevertheless looked to Washington for guidance on how to respond to different alert levels, money to cover the costs of response, and a fair allocation of intergovernmental aid based on risk (Khademian 2004). None of these was immediately forthcoming.

Washington's Response to the Challenge of Local Security

Mobilization for security on the domestic front began, as far as state and local governments were concerned, on the wrong note. Shortly after the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., President George W. Bush established a Homeland Security Council in the Executive Office of the President, but no representatives from state or local governments were invited to join (Krane 2002). Although cities immediately began to develop their own security plans on an ad hoc basis and assign law enforcement personnel to guard vulnerable infrastructure,2 Congress did not provide any federal funds to defray these outlays until March 2003, a year and a half after the attacks, nor did the Homeland Security Council provide any guidance for local planning or strategies to begin taking on new homeland security responsibilities.

A rough framework and program precedents for an intergovernmental partnership were, in fact, in place before the attacks. During the early 1950s, the Office of Civil Defense had funneled money to local governments to train personnel and to establish emergency operations centers in case of a nuclear attack. Forty years later, Congress passed the Stafford Act of 1993,3 which authorized the Federal Emergency Management Agency to reimburse state and local governments for costs incurred responding to a severe disaster. And in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1996, Congress authorized training and equipment money for local first responders in the nation's largest cities through the Defense against Weapons of Mass Destruction Act (also known as the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici Amendment). Then, in 2000, Congress passed the Firefighter Investment and Response Enhancement (FIRE) Act, which established the Assistance to Firefighters program. To some in Washington, the failure to build a coherent security partnership based on the experiences of this hodgepodge of programs suggested "an absence of central focus," a "lack of a cohesive effort," and problems of "coordination and fragmentation in federal preparedness programs," all of which made for "confusion at the state and local levels" and an inability to "effectively partner with the federal government" (GAO 2002, 2).

After 9/11, Congress doubled the funding of the existing FIRE program, which provided grants to local fire departments for training and equipment.4 From the outset, however, critics complained that the administration of the program was plagued by bottlenecks and inflexibility and that the funding was distributed inequitably (CRS 2004b; Khademian 2004). An analysis conducted during early 2004 by the office of Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) found that of the approximately $1.2 billion appropriated between 2001 and 2003, $115 million had not yet been distributed. Five months into fiscal year 2004, none of the $746 million authorized in that funding round had been distributed (CRS 2004a; Maloney 2004).

The FIRE grants were distributed in response to applications, and they were subject to a $750,000 cap for any one fire department.5 The cap meant that the amount of money available to any fire department was not primarily a function of the city's size or the level of threat the city faced. Besides, that sum did not go far in providing equipment for a major urban fire department, though it may have provided amply for a small department's needs.

The cap, which was increased in 2004 to benefit larger jurisdictions, was nevertheless designed both to ensure funding for smaller places, whatever their vulnerability level, and to distribute the money widely across the country-that is, to many rather than a few congressional districts. This has meant that money is more easily spread to less populous states, which are less likely targets of international terrorism. Thus, Montana, North Dakota, and Vermont received $9.33, $8.67, and $8.50 per capita, respectively, in FIRE grants made through February 2004, whereas California, Texas, and New York received only $.86, $ 1.34, and $1.79 per capita (CRS 2004d). New York City itself received only $.09 per capita (Maloney 2004).

According to the analysis done by Representative Maloney s office, there is evidence of a partisan bias in the distribution of these grants, although she does not explore other possible explanations for the pattern. Her data show, nevertheless, that in fiscal years 2001 and 2003, 19.3 percent and 18 percent of Democratic congressional districts, respectively, received no FIRE awards, compared to 6.3 percent and 3.1 percent of Republican districts. Among the districts that did receive money, Democratic districts received only 75 percent and 81 percent (respectively, by fiscal year) of the amount received by Republican districts in the two fiscal years analyzed. The state with the highest level of funding in 2003 and the greatest increase between 2001 and 2003 was Pennsylvania, home of the first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge (Maloney 2004).

With the passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001, die Office for State and Local Domestic Preparedness-then a part of the Justice Department but later transferred to the new Department of Homeland Security as the Office of Domestic Preparedness (ODP)-was authorized to make new grants to state and local governments to help them prepare for and respond to acts of terrorism. Shortly after providing money for the FIRE grants in 2003, Congress used the appropriations process to authorize a series of other programs that channeled money to state and local governments for equipment, training, and planning. The largest of these were the State Homeland Security Grant Program (SHSGP) and the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI). Each of these provides money to local governments through the states. Through fiscal year 2005, appropriations for all of the state and local homeland security programs established in the aftermath of 9/11 averaged slightly more than $3.5 billion annually.

At the beginning, the administration of these new programs was plagued by birthing pains. Incomplete or outdated emergency planning at the state level frequently caused the ODP to delay the release of funds to the states (GAO 2004). States, obligated to re-grant 80 percent of the funds to local governments by set deadlines, deemed themselves in compliance at the moment they agreed to allocate a specific amount to a particular jurisdiction rather than when the money was actually transferred. Months often passed before any funds reached their final destination. Thus, as late as June 2004, nearly two years after the funding for the series of new federal grant programs was approved, 24 percent of 231 cities surveyed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors reported that they had been told to expect funding but had not yet received any (U.S. Conference of Mayors 2004). The states were not the only bottleneck. In some cases, delays were the fault of local governments: Lacking a clear idea of how to use the money, city councils would delay, sometimes for months, voting to accept the grant from the state (GAO 2004).

Technical administrative constraints on local governments emerged as critical issues in the partnership. Local officials believed that these constraints compromised their effectiveness as partners. In all of the grants, except a minor program that permits states to hire emergency planners, Congress restricted spending to equipment, training, and planning costs. Local governments were not allowed to spend the money for new personnel or overtime.6 Mayors complained that the war on terror had stretched their police departments beyond capacity. For example, the federal Transportation Security Administration mandated that local police forces must provide security at airports under municipal control. For example, according to Cleveland mayor Jane Campbell, that city had to increase its police allocation at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport from 26 to 47, but it could not use homeland security grants to hire new officers to replace those who had been moved from other duties (pers. comm., September 24, 2004). Many cities were concerned that they could not use federal money to replace members of their fire and police departments who had been called to active duty with the National Guard for the war in Iraq. Other mayors, such as David Cicilline, mayor of Providence Rhode Island, worried about the Bush administrations attempts to cut or eliminate the Clinton-era COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) program, which provided federal funds to hire additional police officers (pers. comm., September 24, 2004; U.S. Conference of Mayors 2005).

As cities finally began to receive money, a persistent but significant minority complained that they were prevented, either by state rules or federal restrictions, from spending the funds according to their own priorities. Three surveys of slightly different groups of cities conducted by the U.S. Conference of Mayors between September 2003 and June 2004 found that just over one-third of the cities surveyed each time indicated that the uses of the funds permitted would not cover their security priorities (U.S. Conference of Mayors 2003, 2004a, 2004b). The most common complaint was that federal funds could not be used to pay for police overtime, a burden for cities whenever the Department of Homeland Security raised the national alert level. Other complaints had to do with forcing cities to buy equipment mandated by the state that local officials believed was not vital (U.S. Conference of Mayors 2004).

Technical administrative constraints on local governments that arose from spending the grants were a source of discontent in the partnership. The most difficult issue for local government had to do with the requirements of the federal Cash Management Act of 1990, which required cities that received federal funds to spend their own money for homeland security purposes and wait for federal reimbursement. Some cities simply did not have the cash on hand. Others found the wait for reimbursement, sometimes several months, a hardship.