DSBlog

May 21st came and went without any apparent signs that the world was ending, but the nearly three dozen U.S. cities that were dropped two days earlier from the fiscal-year 2011 Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) grant program could nevertheless be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which administers the UASI program, will distribute nearly $663 million in UASI grants in FY2011, a 20% decline from what it allocated last year. (Click on the expandable chart below to see how the FY2010 and FY2011 UASI funding lines diverge.)

There were three ‘headlines’ in the May 19 UASI budget announcement:

• The 11 largest cities by funding have been spared any grant cutbacks at all.
• A less fortunate group of 20 cities suffered significant reductions, mainly in the 25-30% range.
• An astonishing 33 cities were cut from the program entirely and will receive no UASI funding this year.

Some cities might find relief in other portions of the $1.2-billion Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP), but across-the-board budget reductions this year make that less likely. As The Wall Street Journal noted after the FEMA allocations were announced: “Many cities left out likely will still get some grant money indirectly through smaller programs that provide funds for security efforts in states, transit systems, ports and elsewhere, although those amounts also are being significantly reduced.”

Analysis of the FY2011 UASI Program
In the FY2010 budget, Congress appropriated $887 million for UASI, of which $832.5 million was allocated to urban areas (the remainder went towards a statutory “carve-out” for nonprofit organizations plus FEMA’s traditional percentage cut to cover grant program management and administration [M&A]). The 10 best-funded cities, known as Tier I, received $524.5 million, or 63% of the total, with New York City getting the most funds (18.2%). The 54 less-well-funded Tier-II cities received the remaining $308 million (37%); cities receiving the smallest allocation got slightly over $1 million each.

The UASI appropriation for FY2011 is $725 million, an 18.3% drop from what was appropriated in FY2010. The nonprofit carve-out and other deductions like FEMA’s M&A cut leaves $662.6 million to be allocated to the cities, a decrease of 20.2% from the FEMA allocation in FY2010. Tier I has gained an 11th urban area: San Diego. The expanded list of Tier-I cities will be eligible for $540.7 million of the total allocation, and the 20 Tier-II areas will be eligible for the remaining $121.9 million. New York City remained on top with 22.9% of total UASI funding and Los Angeles/Long Beach was second with 13.7%. (Click on the table below to see details of the FY2010 and FY2011 UASI allocations by state and city.)

Here are some of what we would consider the more notable shifts in the UASI program:

• The addition of San Diego is significant in that it boosted Tier I’s share from 63% to 81.6% of the overall UASI dollars available, while Tier II has to make do with 18.4% this year, down from 37%.
• Of all the cities remaining in the UASI program this year, Miami appears to have been hit the hardest. Although it suffered only a 12.6% direct cut, it is merged in the FY2011 UASI program with Fort Lauderdale, which lost all its funding. So the combined entity actually took a 44% hit, dropping from $17.1 million to $9.6 million.
• In terms of which states were impacted the most by the loss of UASI cities, the worst-hit were: New York, which lost four (Buffalo, Rochester, Albany, Syracuse); California with three (Sacramento, Oxnard, Bakersfield); and Texas with three (San Antonio, El Paso, Austin). Several states lost two cities, including Ohio, Louisiana and Oklahoma.
• Finally, in its decision to pass all funding cuts to Tier-II urban areas while keeping Tier I intact, we wonder if the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) could be signaling the beginning of the end of Tier II altogether. This seems to be the way Congress is leaning, with the House Appropriations Committee’s version of the FY2012 DHS appropriations bill restricting UASI grants to the 10 highest-risk urban areas. (Of course this makes DHS’ decision to add an 11th Tier-I city this year all the more curious as well.)

In our next post we will examine the combined effects of changes to the UASI, State Homeland Security Program (SHSP) and other FY2011 grant programs.

Our Projections vs. Actual Allocations
In Part 2 of this series we offered up two predictive scenarios for how the UASI money might be distributed to Tier-I and Tier-II cities. Our first scenario assumed that all 64 cities from FY2010 would remain in the program and that there would be no major shifts in the risk distribution. We projected the 10 Tier-I cities would get the same proportion of the total that they received in FY2010, but of course this would be less money since it started with a lower top-line amount. We projected identical cuts of 20% across the 64 UASI cities.

We called this scenario “improbable” for a number of reasons, focusing instead on a “most likely” second scenario in which a significant number of Tier-II cities would be cut entirely from the program while Tier-I cities would remain at their (real) FY2010 funding levels. This turned out to be very close to what happened: Tier I did in fact remain intact, and the only unanticipated shift was the addition of San Diego. As for Tier II, our estimate of 22 cities cut turned out to be 33, only eight cities shy of a more extreme third scenario we deemed “unlikely,” despite its resemblance to several cutback proposals from Congress.

In explaining the FEMA allocations, DHS pointed out that: “Current intelligence reflects that Al Qaeda, its affiliates and its allies remain focused on carrying out attacks in major US cities such as New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington DC and against our aviation and surface transportation infrastructure.” As we have noted in prior posts, however, imposing cutbacks on smaller cities – as fiscally necessary as that might be just now – creates serious challenges for those affected. The intelligence trove discovered at Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound early this month drove home the point by making it abundantly clear that al-Qaeda is interested in targeting more than just New York and Washington these days.

Others in the homeland security community who anticipated similar UASI cuts have been zeroing in on this point for months. Among the more well-informed commentaries and opinion pieces on the subject are Josh Filler’s February 14 post on the Emergency Management blog on the looming FEMA grant reductions, and an All Hands piece by Steve Davis entitled The Terrorist Threat is not Limited to the 10 Largest Cities.

––––––––––––––––

This is the fifth installment of a six-part analysis of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s FY2011 homeland security grant programs, including comparisons with prior-year funding and assessments of how key grant programs will be distributed. In the sixth and final segment in this series we will evaluate the broader impact of major FY2011 grant program allocations on states and cities.

––––––––––––––––

Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy and budgetary decisions.

Preparedness is not normally a topic that generates much excitement among the general public. But with a growing recognition of the need to educate citizens about being better prepared for all manner of natural hazards, industrial accidents and terrorist events, we were pleased to see the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) taking an entirely new and entertaining approach to the issue by explaining in a blog post what to do in case of a zombie apocalypse.

The message underlying all the surface silliness is of course quite serious. CDC blogger Ali Khan asks: “So what do you need to do before zombies…or hurricanes or pandemics for example, actually happen? First of all, you should have an emergency kit in your house. This includes things like water, food, and other supplies to get you through the first couple of days before you can locate a zombie-free refugee camp (or in the event of a natural disaster, it will buy you some time until you are able to make your way to an evacuation shelter or utility lines are restored).”

Khan then goes on to provide a more detailed list of must-have items for everyone’s emergency kit. A great way to get the message out.

––––––––––––––––

Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy and budgetary decisions.

Late yesterday morning, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released guidance and data on $2.1 billion worth of preparedness grant funding for fiscal-year 2011, which will be allocated across 12 separate grant programs to states, large metropolitan areas and other entities in the coming months. In percentage terms, New York has fared the best – or rather the least badly, since there were cuts across the board compared to last year – while Texas and Florida are the biggest losers this time around.

The largest piece of the pie is the $1.2-billion Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP), administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). HSGP comprises five subprograms, the two largest of which are the Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI), funded at $662.62 million, and the State Homeland Security Program (SHSP), at $526.87 million.

Other grant programs besides HSGP include the:

• Emergency Management Performance Grants (EMPG) program, funded at $329.14 million
• Port Security Grant Program (PSGP), at $235.03 million
• Transit Security Grant Program (TSGP), at $200.08 million

Over the past two weeks we have taken a look at what states and cities were expected to receive under SHSP and UASI. We also examined the separate TSGP. Our analysis in each instance was based on: 1) comparing FY2010 appropriations to those recently approved by Congress for FY2011; 2) subtracting statutory “carve-outs” and other mandatory set-asides; and 3) applying some of the analytical methodologies FEMA and other DHS entities were likely to employ for the upcoming grant distributions based on what we know about their past allocation behavior.

Now that the actual figures have been released we can take a look at what really happened, compare it to our predictions and try to draw some conclusions about how these very difficult decisions were reached. In this post we will take an in-depth look at grant allocations under SHSP, and early next week we’ll evaluate the UASI allocations, which dramatically change the face of that program by eliminating 34 cities, adding another Tier-I city and shifting significant funds out of Tier II and into Tier I.

Overview
In announcing the grants on May 19, DHS cited its three overarching priorities for SHSP and UASI as follows:

• Advancing “Whole Community” Security and Emergency Management: “Whole Community” fosters a national emergency management approach and considers all aspects of a community to effectively prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from, and mitigate against any terrorist attack or natural disaster.
• Building Prevention and Protection Capabilities: As terrorist threats have evolved, DHS has sought to detect and mitigate threats, such as home grown terrorism and foreign terrorist groups. DHS encourages the use of SHSP and UASI funds to support programs and initiatives such as the development and implementation of Fusion Liaison Officer Programs, the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative (NSI), and the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign.
• Maturation and Enhancement of State and Major Urban Area Fusion Centers: One of the Department’s priorities is to support recognized state and major urban area fusion centers and the maturation of the Information Sharing Environment (ISE). Fusion centers serve as focal points for the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of threat-related information between the Federal government and State, local, Tribal, territorial and private sector partners. Building a National Network of Fusion Centers helps law enforcement and homeland security personnel understand the local implications of national intelligence, so they can better protect their communities.

Analysis of the FY2011 SHSP Program
SHSP grants are distributed to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and four U.S. territories. As we have seen in our three previous analyses, allocations are always less than the amount appropriated by Congress due to the carve-outs, other set-asides and a grant management and administration (M&A) cut that FEMA is permitted to take off the top.

The state-by-state allocation methodology for SHSP grants is generally based on three factors: legislatively-mandated minimum grant amounts, DHS’ risk methodology, and effectiveness. These are described in greater detail in our May 6 post on SHSP.

In FY2010 the SHSP appropriation was $950 million. After carve-outs, FEMA M&A and set-asides, a total of $842 million was distributed to the states, DC, Puerto Rico and the territories. This year, the SHSP appropriation was $725 million, nearly 24% less than last year. The net amount to be allocated as grants is $526.87 million, 37.3% less than was allocated in FY2010. The expandable table at right compares FY2010 and FY2011 FEMA allocations (not congressional appropriations) to each state, and also contains data that will be referred to later in this post.

New York will receive $91.2 million in SHSP grants this year. Relatively speaking it’s the biggest winner because it drops only 19.7% from its FY2010 level of $113.5 million – the smallest decline of any state or territory. Of the other large SHSP states, California suffered the largest dollar loss overall (cut $34.5 million to end up at $73 million), but its percentage loss was a fairly mild 32.1%. Two others were down a whopping 50% off their FY2010 allocations: Texas ended up at $28.6 million compared to its $57.1-million allocation last year, and Florida got $16.5 million whereas in FY2010 it received $33 million.

At the other end of the scale, 29 states (including Puerto Rico) are at the $5,137,205 statutory minimum this year, and all four territories are at their new and slightly lower minimum of $1,157,680. In FY2010 there were 22 states at the minimum, plus the four territories. This marks the first time that more than half of all states are at the minimum.

One other development of note is that the states at the bottom, already drawing the minimums, saw the smallest decreases in funding (after New York’s) at 22.3%. The states in the middle by contrast, those that had been well above the minimums in FY2010, bore the brunt of the pain with 19 states falling 50%. Since the dollars are allocated according to risk, the only explanation for an even 50% being the maximum loss anyone will experience is that DHS set an explicit floor policy, ensuring that no state would lose more than half its funding.

Beyond the statutory minimum rules and the apparent commitment to protect any one state from suffering too big of a decline, there appears to have been another, more nebulous, element in the DHS calculus. This “third rule” seems to have ensured that New York, California, Illinois and Washington DC would be subject to reductions of less than 50%. They are, after all, the only ones that didn’t get cut in half and were not at the state minimum. We must assume that the risk in these states increased over other states like Texas, Florida, New Jersey, Virginia and others that were previously ranked higher. Illinois, in particular, appears to have risen in risk, at least relative to Texas and Florida. Both of those latter states were above Illinois in FY2010 funding and while Illinois fell 37.9% this year, Florida and Texas both fell 50% – and Florida ends up with less funding than Illinois in FY2011 grants.

Our Projections vs. Actual Allocations
With the SHSP figures now available, what can we learn about the differences between the allocation curve we predicted two weeks ago and the grant amounts each state is actually going to receive?

In our earlier post we projected FY2011 grant allocations by taking the appropriations, netting out the expected carve-outs and set-asides, and allocating the remainder in the same proportion as they were allocated in FY2010. Significantly, we assumed allocations in which the relative risks from state to state had not changed much and thus that the same basic allocation approach would be used in FY2011.

Comparing our FY2011 best-guess estimates with the FY2011 actual allocations reveals an interesting shift. New York, California and Illinois did better than we expected, while Texas and Florida lost significantly more (given their larger dollar amounts) and every other state lost about what we anticipated they would. (Click on the comparative chart below, which shows our estimates on the left in red and actuals on the right in blue. The two right-hand columns of the table above provide additional details on the difference between estimates and actuals for each state.) We would ascribe these differences to significant changes in the risk or allocation strategies from FY2010 to FY2011 – in particular that “third rule” we referred to above – which in relative terms benefitted New York, California and Illinois at the expense of the other states, especially Texas and Florida.

––––––––––––––––

This is the fourth installment of a multi-part analysis of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s FY2011 homeland security grant programs, including comparisons with prior-year funding and assessments of how key grant programs would be distributed. In this and subsequent posts we will be evaluating the analytical implications of these grants and comparing our predictions to actual FEMA grant allocations.

Note: Now that the guidance and grant application kit have been released, key upcoming milestones for the FY2011 preparedness grants are:
- June 10: Deadline for Operation Stonegarden (OPSG) subgrantee applications
- June 20: Deadline for all preparedness grant applications except TSGP
- July 5: Deadline for TSGP applications

––––––––––––––––

Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises, for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy, and budgetary decisions.

The Atlantic basin “is expected to see an above-normal hurricane season this year,” according to a pre-season outlook issued today by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Beginning June 1st and running through November 30th, the Atlantic hurricane season generates much attention because of its potential for destruction along the heavily populated and built-up coastal areas of the eastern and southern U.S.

NOAA has a very good record of accurately predicting the number and magnitude of storms in the Atlantic basin, as it did last year. (It does not attempt to predict in advance the landfall locations or paths of the storms, as these are “dictated by weather patterns in place at the time the storm approaches.”)

In its latest seasonal outlook, NOAA predicts the following ranges:

• 12 to 18 named storms (winds of 39 mph or higher), of which:
• 6 to 10 could become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher), including:
• 3 to 6 major hurricanes (Category 3, 4 or 5; winds of 111 mph or higher)

“Each of these ranges has a 70 percent likelihood,” NOAA says, “and indicate that activity will exceed the seasonal average of 11 named storms, six hurricanes and two major hurricanes.”

Stay tuned as well for the mid-season updates to this forecast.

––––––––––––––––

Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy and budgetary decisions.

Rail security has been much in the news lately, so we thought it would be an opportune time to delve into fiscal-year 2011 budget numbers for the Transit Security Grant Program (TSGP) in this third installment of our ongoing series on Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) grant funding. From the looks of it, transit agencies are facing nearly a quarter less TSGP funding than they got last year. Read on to see why.

The stated goal of TSGP is to provide “funds to owners and operators of transit systems (which include intracity bus, commuter bus, ferries, and all forms of passenger rail) to protect critical surface transportation infrastructure and the traveling public from acts of terrorism, major disasters, and other emergencies.” The question is how far a dwindling pot of funding can be stretched while still allowing transit authorities to continue to meet this ambitious goal.

As in Parts 1 and 2 of this series, which respectively examined the much larger State Homeland Security Program (SHSP) and Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI), we will again compare FY2010 and just-released FY2011 appropriations numbers, factoring in mandatory funding provisions and past TSGP allocation patterns, to predict how FEMA is likely to distribute this year’s TSGP grants to transit agencies around the country.*

In FY2010, Congress appropriated $300 million for TSGP, but the amount actually allocated was less. For example, FEMA traditionally takes a cut to cover management and administration (M&A) of all grant programs; the congressionally authorized M&A cut in FY2010 was 4%, or $12 million, leaving $288 million. Congress mandated that $20 million of the appropriation would go to Amtrak in a so-called “carve-out,” and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) put another $15 million into the Freight Rail Security Grant Program (FRSGP).

The $253.44 million left over for TSGP proper was allocated across two so-called “tiers,” based on the relative size of the transit systems serving each large metropolitan area. Tier I consisted of transit agencies in the eight highest-risk urban areas, and FY2010 grants were awarded directly rather than via competition. Tier II comprised all other eligible transit agencies and were subject to a fully competitive process. (Click on the expandable table at right for a list of all Tier I and II cities and transit agencies, as well as details of how FY2010 funds were allocated.)

Almost all of the TSGP total allocation, or $226.14 million, was put into the eight Tier-I areas, while the Tier-II total was $27.3 million. Tier-I awards were announced ahead of time, according to TSA’s proprietary (and non-public) risk formula, and from largest to smallest were as follows:

• New York City/Northern New Jersey/Connecticut
• Greater National Capital Region
• Boston
• San Francisco Bay Area
• Chicago
• Philadelphia
• Greater Los Angeles
• Atlanta

In FY2010 there was also a separate program called the Intercity Bus Security Grant Program (IBSGP), with $12 million appropriated and $11.5 million allocated.

In FY2011, the TSGP appropriation has dropped from $300 million to $250 million. FEMA’s higher 5.8% M&A cut this year works out to $14.5 million, while the Amtrak carve-out remains $20 million. IBSGP was defunded, renamed Over-the-Road Bus Security, and made a $5-million TSGP carve-out instead of receiving a separate appropriation. So if FRSGP remains at $15 million, this leaves only $195.5 million for TSGP proper, a decrease of 22.87% over last year’s allocation.

With no reason to believe any structural changes will be made in the tiers or that the relative tier allocations will change, Tier-I TSGP grant recipients can expect their grant awards to be correspondingly less than FY2010 by almost 23%. And the competitive Tier-II process will likely be more contentious as transit agencies vie for pieces of an even-smaller small pie. They are sure to invoke recent revelations that Osama bin Laden was planning attacks on smaller U.S. cities and specifically on transit systems before he was killed, plans that his surviving al-Qaeda minions are unlikely to drop any time soon.

DHS is expected to announce allocations for TSGP and other grant programs later this week.

* Management and administration of the TSGP is more complex than some of the other grant programs, as it involves both FEMA and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). According to the FY2010 TSGP Program Guidance, “FEMA is responsible for designing and operating the administrative mechanisms needed to implement and manage the grant program. TSA provides programmatic subject matter expertise for the transportation industry and assists by coordinating the myriad of intelligence information and risk/vulnerability assessments resulting in ranking and rating rail and mass transit assets nationwide against threats associated with potential terrorist attacks and in defining the parameters for identifying, protecting, deterring, responding, and recovering from such incidents. Together, these two agencies with additional assistance and cooperation of the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), for rail and mass transit systems, and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), as needed for freight rail operations, determine the primary security architecture of the TSGP.”

––––––––––––––––

This is the third installment of a multi-part analysis of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s FY2011 homeland security grant programs, including comparisons with prior-year funding and assessments of key grant programs. In subsequent posts we will be evaluating the analytical implications of these grants and comparing our predictions to actual FEMA grant allocations.

––––––––––––––––

Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises, for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy, and budgetary decisions.

Shortly before 11:00 PM on Sunday May 1, President Obama informed the nation in a televised address that special-operations forces had killed Osama bin Laden earlier that day. Exactly four days later, the Associated Press broke the news that local officials had been briefed on a threat to the U.S. rail system, gleaned from analyzing data captured at bin Laden’s secret hideaway in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

AP said the information gathered also “indicated a desire to hit the U.S. with large-scale attacks in major cities and on key dates such as anniversaries and holidays,” a hallmark of previous bin Laden-directed attacks. While we lament what appears to be a leak of sensitive information, we are amazed at the spectacular performance of the intelligence and security communities, especially when compared to where they were when the 9/11 attacks occurred.

This time, nearly 10 years later, information was collected in a covert operation, exploited by intelligence agencies, shared with DHS and then shared with fusion centers and law enforcement.  And this all happened in a matter of days, standing in stark contrast to the systemic dysfunction – stove-piped organizations, lack of info-sharing and even lack of understanding as to whom to share with – so depressingly documented in the 9/11 Commission report. An excellent write-up of the intel aspects of the raid can be found in this recent InformationWeek piece.

As regular DSBlog readers will know from our not-infrequent posts on the subject, the country still has a long way to go to achieve acceptable levels of information sharing. We have also questioned the reasoning behind the overall levels and proportional distribution of security funding to various agencies and programs, and this certainly includes the way funds are allocated for transportation security (click on the expandable map at right to view recent threats to the rail system). In fact The Wall Street Journal noted just yesterday, that “for every $50 the Transportation Security Administration spends on aviation security, the agency budgets $1 to protect surface transportation,” which includes buses as well as passenger and freight rail systems.

But credit where credit is due: in the decade since September 11, 2001, we have made clear and remarkable progress.

(Map graphic courtesy of the Heritage Foundation via The Wall Street Journal)

––––––––––––––––

Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises, for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy, and budgetary decisions.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will soon start distributing urban security grants that had been held up by repeated delays in finalizing the fiscal-year 2011 federal budget.

U.S. cities that are eligible to receive much-needed funding under this Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) are eagerly anticipating the details, which have not yet been made public by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). But their eagerness is tempered by anxiety over exactly how this year’s smaller pool of grant funds will be allocated.

UASI has typically been the second-largest component of FEMA’s Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP), after the State Homeland Security Program (SHSP) we analyzed in Part 1 of this DSBlog series. However, FY2011 marks the first time more grant dollars will be distributed through the UASI program than through SHSP.

To fill the void in advance of the DHS announcement we decided to take a look at the “known knowns” – how FY2010 UASI appropriations were allocated, top-line FY2011 appropriations numbers and relevant statutory requirements – and use those to make educated judgments as to how this year’s UASI funds might be distributed.

How the UASI Program Works
UASI (pronounced yu-AZZ-ee) differs significantly from SHSP in several respects, but these differences can be summed up in two broad categories: grant eligibility and allocation guidance.

Grant Eligibility
Each year SHSP grants are allocated to all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and four U.S. territories: American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands. By contrast, the list of cities that are eligible to receive UASI grants can change from one year to the next as they are added or removed from the program.

Section 2003 of the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007 directs the FEMA Administrator to assess the relative threat, vulnerability and consequences from acts of terrorism to each of the 100 most populous metropolitan statistical areas, or MSAs, in the U.S. (MSAs in Puerto Rico are typically included in this.) Sec. 2007 of the 9/11 Act further identifies specific data elements that must be considered in this risk assessment, including population, population density, history of threats, borders, coastlines, unmet target capabilities and other items that are specified in writing by FEMA.

As part of this evaluation, the Administrator is instructed to engage each large MSA to ascertain whether it has relevant threat, vulnerability or consequence information, to review DHS risk assessments for all urban areas, and to give each one the opportunity to remedy erroneous or incomplete information. The language then states that “based on that assessment, the Administrator shall designate high-risk urban areas that may submit applications for grants under this section.” In other words, 100 MSAs form the starting point and then, based on a risk assessment performed transparently with the MSAs, high-risk urban areas are designated that can apply for grants. These designees are known colloquially as “the UASIs.”

Allocation Guidance
Once the UASIs are determined for a new fiscal year, all of the funds are allocated essentially at the discretion of the FEMA Administrator. For the SHSP, the 9/11 Act stipulates that all of the 50-states-plus-six must receive at least a pre-established minimum grant amount, with the balance of funds allocated on the basis of assessed risk and effectiveness. UASI on the other hand has no minimums, but there are other factors that must be considered in the allocation formula.

Sec. 2007 of the 9/11 Act states that “in allocating funds… the Administrator shall consider” the same series of risk factors used to designate eligible MSAs as UASIs in the first place, as well as each UASI’s effectiveness in the proposed use of the grant. This has traditionally been communicated as a risk-based allocation, and the dollars have followed the risk curve. Thus, unlike SHSP where most of the available dollars are allocated to the minimums by a legislative formula, all of the UASI funds are distributed at the discretion of DHS.

UASI Funding Analysis
For political and program-continuity reasons cities are rarely dropped from the UASI program, and the list has thus tended to grow larger from year to year. Moreover, although not specified by law, for the past several years the UASIs have been divided into two tiers, with the higher Tier-I cities receiving proportionally more funds than the lower Tier-II cities. There were 64 UASIs altogether in FY2010 of which 10, including the National Capital Region, were designated as Tier I and the remaining 54 were Tier II. Two of those cities were new to the program last year. (Click on the table at right to view all FY2010 UASIs, their tier rankings and allocated grant amounts).

In the FY2010 budget, Congress appropriated $1.786 billion for HSGP overall, and $887 million specifically for UASI. As with SHSP, however, the total sum allocated by FEMA under UASI each year is distinctly smaller than the amount appropriated, due to so-called “carve-outs” and other mandatory set-asides.

Of the $887-million appropriation there was a $19-million statutory carve-out for nonprofit organizations, leaving $868 million. In addition, FEMA traditionally takes a percentage cut to cover management and administration (M&A) of its grant programs. Congress authorized 4% for grant M&A in FY2010, which worked out to a further $35.5-million cut of the UASI appropriation, leaving $832.5 million for allocation to urban areas.

The sum was divided so that the 10 Tier-I UASIs received $524.5 million, or 63% of the total, and the 54 Tier-II UASIs received the remaining $308 million. New York City received the most funds – 18.2% of the total – with the smallest amount going to four UASIs, at slightly over $1 million apiece. (See chart at right for a graphical depiction of the FY2010 allocations).

For FY2011, Congress has appropriated $1.337 billion for HSGP, a decline of about 25% from last year. Of that total, the UASI appropriation was $725 million, an 18.3% drop from the $887-million top line in FY2010. After the $19-million nonprofit carve-out, $706 million will be left. FEMA is allowed to take an M&A cut this year of up to 5.8%, or just over $42 million. That would leave $663.95 million to be allocated to the UASIs, a decrease of 20.2% from 2010.

The following analysis uses the same methodology we used in Part 1 of this series. It likewise assumes that prior-year allocations were made proportional to risk and that, despite changes to the risk formula for FY2011, there will be no large fundamental changes to that underlying risk distribution. It also assumes the same UASIs are kept in the program for 2011.

On that basis, the distribution would look like the chart at right. Top-ranked New York City would receive $120.9 million, while Tier I as a whole would get $418.3 million and Tier II would take in only $245.7 million. To our mind, however, this graph and these results seem improbable. Cuts to high-risk Tier-I cities are very hard to defend politically, and with a mere $800,000 allocation for each of the bottom cities it would be extremely difficult to run a UASI program and produce meaningful results.

What are the other allocation options DHS could pursue? First, they may decide to reduce the list of designated UASIs. This was last done in 2006, and it is a painful process for DHS and for the UASIs that don’t make the list. However, with declining budgets this may be inevitable. How many cities are removed from the list is the most critical factor, but considering that $162 million in appropriations have been removed from UASI (translating into $168.6 million less in allocations), that higher M&A cuts may be taken by FEMA, and that the bottom UASIs only receive minimal funds to begin with, it will take a lot of cutting at the bottom to make up for that shortfall.

A second option that may be pursued is to increase the percentage of dollars allocated to Tier I to try to limit the reductions to high-risk cities. Keeping the Tier-I cities at their 2010 levels would take 79% of overall funds, leaving only $139.5 million for Tier II, and increasing the likelihood of cuts to the bottom UASIs. (See chart, right.)

Other more extreme options are available to tweak the allocations. For example, if FEMA were to try to hold year-over-year UASI funding constant and start funding from the top, they would run out of money in Kansas City and there would only be 23 UASIs in the program. In other words, a 20% cut to the UASI program would require the wholesale sacrifice of the bottom 41 UASIs to keep the top 23 whole. While this is an unlikely scenario, it does in fact closely resemble one recently floated in Congress, where two members of the New York House delegation, no doubt reading the tea leaves, have proposed that FEMA restrict the UASI program to the top 25 cities.

Extreme scenarios aside, the most likely options – and the ones that will have the greatest impact – are cuts to the overall number of designated cities and/or adjustments between Tier I and Tier II. These decisions will be very difficult for DHS to make and even more difficult to communicate.

In addition to these cutbacks, a few other state and local issues should be considered. First, if DHS allocates SHSP funds to the states anywhere close to what we described in our previous post, New York and California already face significant cuts. If UASIs at the bottom are then cut from the program this year, they will feel a disproportionate impact, since likely candidates include Syracuse, Albany and Rochester in New York and Bakersfield, Oxnard and Sacramento in California. In other words, aggregate homeland security funds to these two states will take a beating.

Another important UASI consideration is the state’s holdback of UASI funds. States are required to distribute 80% of the UASI funds to local jurisdictions, but may withhold up to 20% at the state level to fund programs on behalf of the UASIs.  Many states in recent years have taken significantly less than their 20% holdback – most notably Texas, which has several UASIs and two Tier-I cities. But with SHSP reductions looming, and therefore less funds available at the state level, will these states increase their holdbacks, thus further reducing the amount of dollars available to their UASIs in FY2011?

––––––––––––––––

This is the second installment of a multi-part analysis of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Fiscal-Year 2011 Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP), including comparisons with prior-year funding and an assessment of key grant programs. In subsequent posts we will be evaluating the analytical implications of these grants, comparison of these analyses to actual grant allocations, and analyses of other HSGP grant programs.

––––––––––––––––

Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises, for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy, and budgetary decisions.

It was an unconventional approach to intelligence-gathering and -analysis, to say the least. More than two years ago, a group of UCLA geography professors and their undergraduate students used “biogeographic theories” to pinpoint the region that includes Abbottabad, Pakistan, as the likely location of Osama bin Laden’s hideaway.

A technical paper describing the project can be found in the February 2009 issue of MIT International Review. According to the abstract, the project’s participants used: “biogeographic theories associated with the distribution of life and extinction (distance-decay theory, island biogeography theory, and life history characteristics) and remote sensing data (Landsat ETM+, Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, Defense Meteorological Satellite, QuickBird) over three spatial scales (global, regional, local) to identify where bin Laden is most probably currently located.”

A more layman-friendly write-up was recently published in Homeland Security Newswire, which noted “the group predicted that bin Laden was hiding in the Pakistani city of Parachinar, a town not unlike Abbotabbad (the model predicted that there was a 100 percent likelihood that bin Laden was in Parachinar, and 80.9 percent that he was in Abbottabad).” A similar synposis can be found in Science, a journal of the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

(Image courtesy of MIT International Review)

––––––––––––––––

Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises, for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy, and budgetary decisions.

The U.S. federal budget for fiscal year 2011 was signed into law on April 15 after more than six months of delays, freeing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to allocate grant funds that had been held up by a series of stopgap continuing budget resolutions.

Eligibility details and the specific amounts to be allocated under FEMA’s Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP) have not been made public, however, causing continued uncertainty among the state and local agencies that are the primary recipients of the grants.

Accordingly, we’ve tried to draw some reasonable conclusions about how the program’s funds will be allocated during the remainder of FY2011, which ends on September 30. To do this we took what is known about FY2011 appropriations and compared that data against FY2010 appropriations and grant allocation patterns. We also factored in allocation requirements outlined in the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007.

Of the $1.891 billion appropriated by Congress for HSGP grants in FY2010, the lion’s share went to two subprograms – the State Homeland Security Program (SHSP) and the Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI). In this post we will focus specifically on the SHSP, while in the next installment we will analyze the UASI program.

In FY2010 the SHSP appropriation was $950 million. A statutory “carve-out” of $60 million for a border security program known as Operation Stonegarden left $890 million to be allocated to the states. However, the actual sum was lower still, since FEMA traditionally takes a cut to cover management and administration (M&A) of all grant programs. Congress authorized 4% for grant M&A in FY2010, which works out to a $38-million slice of the SHSP appropriation. From the remaining $852 million, another $10 million was set aside to allow eligible tribes to compete for SHSP funds.

The resulting $842 million in SHSP grant allocations for FY2010 are shown in the chart at right (click to expand), broken down by state. SHSP grants are made to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and four U.S. territories: American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Details on the funds allocated to each state can be found in Appendix A of this FEMA bulletin.

The 9/11 Act sets a mandatory minimum amount of state funding for SHSP grants. In FY2010 that figure was 0.36% of the total SHSP and UASI grant allocation, or $6,613,200. The minimum for the territories was set at 0.08%, or $1,469,600. Twenty-two states received the statutory minimum (including Puerto Rico, which is treated as a state). State grant funds are distributed “according to risk and effectiveness,” and amounts beyond the minimum are allocated at the discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security and based on an analysis conducted by FEMA, and DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (OI&A) and Office of Infrastructure Protection (OIP).

In the FY2011 budget, Congress appropriated $1.450 billion for the Homeland Security Grant Program, a decline of about 25% from last year’s $1.891 billion. Of that total, the SHSP appropriation was $725 million, a nearly 24% drop from the $950-million top line in FY2010.

Like last year, there will again be a significant difference between what Congress appropriated and what FEMA will allocate to the states. For one thing there are several additional carve-outs, totaling $145 million. Besides Operation Stonegarden (slightly lower this year at $55 million), these include a new carve-out of $45 million for the Driver’s License Security Grant Program, and two others – Metropolitan Medical Response System ($35 million) and Citizen Corps Program ($10 million) – that had been funded as separate HSGP subprograms last year.

Factoring in the carve-outs, that $725 million state grant appropriation is now down to $580 million. Follow that with FEMA’s M&A cut, which this year is 5.8%, or $42.05 million, and assuming the same $10 million tribal set-aside as last year, and what’s really left to be allocated to the states is $527.95 million. That is a 37% drop from last year’s $842 million in allocations.

Meanwhile the statutory state minimums have come down slightly to 0.355%, or $5,147,500. The territory minimums have stayed at 0.08%, which at this year’s lower funding baseline means $1,160,000.

Using current appropriations numbers and based on how FEMA allocated last year’s funds, it is possible to estimate how SHSP grants may be allocated in FY2011. Assuming that the FY2011 funding curve stays close to last year’s and that the risks haven’t changed significantly, we believe the SHSP allocation could look like the chart at right.

Under this analytical scenario, the top 26 states by funding would face 41% funding declines as compared to last year. The three highest-ranked states would look like this:

• New York reduced from $113.5 million to $67.1 million;
• California reduced from $107.5 million to $63.5 million; and
• Texas reduced from $57.1 million to $33.8 million.

These would be significant reductions from previous allocations, signaling some likely changes from FEMA. No doubt difficult decisions – on the overall allocation approach, its analytical foundation, its policy implications and how to communicate it to stakeholders – are currently being debated at DHS.

From a state perspective, moreover, the law allows each state to take 5% of its SHSP allocation to cover M&A, and each must provide at least 80% of its grant to the counties and cities in that state. That leaves only 15-20% available to run a state homeland security office. How will states be able to meet program requirements, continue existing initiatives and support key homeland security activities under such cuts?

In a forthcoming post we will investigate how much that funding can buy – and how feasible it is to run a state risk management program, respond to data calls and support a state fusion center on those limited dollars.

––––––––––––––––

This is the first installment of a multi-part analysis of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP), including comparisons with prior-year funding and an assessment of key grant programs.

––––––––––––––––

Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises, for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy, and budgetary decisions.

With Osama bin Laden now out of the picture, many analysts are noting that the threat posed by the core al-Qaeda group he headed had already receded significantly, even as a loose coalition of some 33 regional AQ affiliates and other unaffiliated terror groups have become more active. While that certainly seems to be the case, it obscures the fact that al-Qaeda can claim the highest percentage of fatalities of any terrorist group in recent memory, and with that the dubious title of ‘Most Deadly.’

This morning, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) published a helpful statistical and visual analysis of AQ’s record in the decade from 1998 to 2008, focusing on bin Laden’s core group – what it calls al-Qaeda Central – but not including its regional affiliates like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or al-Qaeda in Iraq.

START’s main point is that, even if AQ Central is in its twilight, it was responsible for more casualties than any of the other 600-plus terrorist groups operating in the 98-08 period – at least 4,299 deaths and 6,300 woundings during a spate of 84 attacks. (See image at right [Note: spelling differences are due to multiple Arabic transliteration systems]. Data courtesy of the Global Terrorism Database.)

Fatality data from other large terrorist groups, by comparison, are smaller: ETA (Spain) caused 820 deaths from 1972-2008 and the IRA (Northern Ireland) has caused 1,829 deaths from 1970 to the present. Only FARC (Colombia) caused more deaths at 4,835, but that was spread over a 30-year period.

That means that while AQ was responsible for less than 1% of the 20,204 terrorist attacks that took place during the decade from 1998, it caused a full 21% of the fatalities.

AQ Central eclipsed other terror groups, START notes, due to its focus on inflicting mass casualties. But where exactly has that strategy gotten the global jihadist movement? Recently, AQ and its ilk have been caught off guard by the wave of popular uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, supposedly its regions of core support, in which peaceful protest rather than violent jihad has been the preferred choice of millions of citizens in seeking the overthrow of corrupt and inbred regimes that have outstayed their welcome.

In other words, ‘Most Deadly’ no longer necessarily equates with ‘Most Successful.’

––––––––––––––––

Digital Sandbox is the leader in public safety risk management, providing analytic tools and information products to government agencies and large enterprises, for optimizing risk-based strategic, policy, and budgetary decisions.