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Release Date: November 28, 2006
Washington, D.C.Grants & Training 2006 National Conference
Well, thank you for that welcome and thank you for being a little patient with me. We hit a little bit of traffic coming in today.
Now those of you who've been to Washington or lived in Washington know this room is also the location for the infamous White House Correspondents Dinner. And the difference between that dinner and this is, first of all, they're not serving you rubber chicken, and second, I'm not going to be that funny.
But I do appreciate the opportunity to be with you here today to talk about the importance of preparedness and partnership in the country. As Corey told you, preparedness is one of the foundation stones of what we do at the Department of Homeland Security. And as witnessed by the fact that you're here today, I think all of us understand that whether we are dealing with an act of terror or a natural disaster, preparedness is a shared responsibility. We all have to work together to protect our communities and our country, and we have to do it not by mandates from the top down but by networking from the bottom up, community by community, state by state, and throughout the federal government.
Effective preparedness requires teamwork across all levels of the government and society, and it requires joint planning, coordination, training and execution. We have to have a common approach, a coordinated approach, across all of the phases of what we have to do to create homeland security -- prevention, protection, response and recovery. So what I'd like to do today is talk a little bit about our vision at the department for managing the full breadth of preparedness activities in partnership with all of you, how we can add value to your efforts, and where we want to go in the future.
I'm going to repeat something I've said a lot in the almost two years I've been on this job, which is the core principle that animates what we do at DHS, and that is risk management. It is a recognition of the fact that management of risk is not elimination of risk. There is no elimination of risk in life, and anybody who promises every single person protection against every threat at every moment in every place in the country is making a false promise.
What we do have to do isentify and prioritize risks -- understanding the threat, the vulnerability and the consequence. And then we have to apply our resources in a cost-effective manner, using discipline and common sense in order to minimize the risk without imposing undue cost on our communities and our families. Now what that means from my standpoint is that I have to look at the totality of risk across the United States and I have to work with the department to figure out where to make the investments to reduce risks in the most efficient way possible and build the necessary capabilities across the country to help you do your jobs.
That means a few specific things. Obviously it means that the high risk locations are going to get a disproportionate amount of money. I think that's the intent of Congress. I think that's the intent of the people. But it doesn't mean that the high risk people or places get all the money. So that while, for example, we do put a lot of emphasis on protecting the big cities and the major elements of infrastructure, we do have to recognize that we have a responsibility to elevate protection for the entire nation.
So we have to invest our resources that balance the need to give the most to the high risk areas, but also to make sure that everybody is getting a basic level of capability to do what they need to do to protect Americans in our towns and our rural areas from sea to sea. I also know that every single person from every community quite rightly is an advocate for the needs and requirements of that community. That's your job; that is what I would do if I were in your place. You quite rightly have the perspective of the people that you are representing in terms of what their needs are. But we also know that if you were to add up all of those needs as perceived by the representatives of every community, we would have to give out 10 or 15 times as much money as we actually have in the pool of what is appropriated. So of necessity, there's going to be some disappointment and some need to balance all of these requests across a common template of risk.
Now it may startle you to hear me remind you that since 9/11 the federal government has provided more than $18 billion in grants to state and local governments, and that is a lot of money. As Everett Dirksen, the late Everett Dirksen used to say, you know, a billion here and a billion there, pretty soon it does start to sound like real money. And that's money that's been important to give to you. It's also money that has to be wisely spent and supervised.
But even with this large infusion of funds, we do have finite resources, and we can't -- in fact, it would be a mathematical responsibility to suggest that we could fully fund capabilities to meet every imaginable risk. So what I want to do today is talk to you about the steps we're going to take going forward to make our grant process more effective, more transparent, and more user friendly consistent with the principles of risk management that I've just talked about.
I also want to say, before I discuss what we're going to do, that we have a very keen recognition of the primacy of state and local government in developing the skills and capabilities for preparedness. State and local governments know communities the best. They know their communities much better than the federal government in Washington knows their communities. And therefore, the expertise to tailor planning and capabilities to specific needs best resides with the lowest level of government. What we can do is not federalize preparedness but help you do your jobs by adding value where federal government resources have a particular help that we can generate, or where our planning capability, looking across the entire horizon, can give you a boost in terms of the specific planning that you need to do for your individual communities.
So let me talk about some of the areas where I think we can add value without preempting you and where I think we can add these values of clarity, transparency, and common sense and user friendliness in how we assist you in doing your jobs. Well, first let me talk about prevention. Obviously, when it comes to terrorism, our best solution is a solution that prevents a terrorist act before it actually comes about. And a critical element in that is our early warning system, which is intelligence -- intelligence gathering, intelligence analysis, and intelligence dissemination to people who need to know.
And since September 11th, we have accomplished a paradigm shift in how we share information and intelligence across the government and the private sector. We've done it by fusing and integrating our intelligence analytic capabilities, by developing and building upon an information sharing environment, by lowering some of the walls to information sharing that used to exist before the passage of the Patriot Act.
One of the critical insights we've had is that we have to do, not only a better job of horizontal sharing, as we have succeeded, I think, in doing over the last five years, but we have to do more in terms of vertical sharing. And that's, by the way, not a one-way street. It's not just us pushing information down to you; it's you -- helping you collect and push information up to us because increasingly the threats we have to worry about are not merely those that come from overseas, but homegrown threats of the kind, for example, that the United Kingdom has lately faced in 2005 and 2006 with some of the homegrown plots that came to light over there.
One of the keys to moving this vertical pathway in information sharing -- are fusion centers that are now being created in many of the states and the major urban areas in this country. We see a tremendous value in having a national network of linked intelligence fusion centers to facilitate the two-way sharing of information, and we look forward to enabling and assisting the creation and development of those fusion centers.
One of the things, for example, we're in the process of doing is deploying DHS intelligence and analytic personnel to all the major fusion centers, and getting that done by the end of 2008. We're already getting that done in a number of major cities. This will allow us to build a vertical network to match the horizontal network of intelligence and information sharing for all of our communities across the country.
Second, let me talk about the issue of grants. Again, we recognize that we have high risk regions that are going to get a disproportionate amount of the assistance because they have the greater risk. We also recognize, though, that we cannot give them all the money. We have to make sure that all communities in all states have some basic capabilities.
Now let me tell you what we've tried to do over the last few years. We've tried to move in a more disciplined fashion in two ways, first of all in terms of understanding risk, which again is threat vulnerability and consequence. And part of that means not only looking at what's happened in the past, although understanding what's happened in the past is important, but trying to anticipate what's going to happen in the future, and trying to do it in a way that is based upon hard analytics and not just anecdote and whatever happens to be in the news.
At the same time, we need to be more disciplined about what we give communities grants to spend money on. There were stories early on after the creation of the department and even before the department was created about money being spent for homeland security with what I might describe as a very generous description of homeland security. And we all know that anybody with a modicum of creativity can find a way to take almost any governmental function and spin it in a way that says it enhances homeland security. But we also know that's not what Congress and the public thinks we're doing with homeland security funds. So we have to build a way of describing what we do so that we have a more specific and clear definition of what is appropriate spending. And that, by the way, gives us a better ability to hold people accountable for the way they actually spend the money, so we have fewer of those stories about leather jackets and gym equipment that I think we all remember reading after the first round of grants went out early in the period after 9/11.
So let me tell you how we're going about getting to the next level of clarity and discipline in doing this. We are using risk-tiering as a way ofentifying communities with higher risks so we can allocate an appropriate portion of the total funds to those communities. And I'll give you a concrete example based on what we did with mass transit during our grants for the 2006 grant cycle.
Weentified through tier one a number of communities that we believed had the highest risk in terms of mass transit. That was based upon ridership; it was based upon the architecture of the system in which we were able toentify those systems with a higher degree of vulnerability. If one tries to analyze for example what a specific bomb could do in system number one as opposed to system number two, we looked at the different architecture. And then, having analyzed the risk, we granted a significant proportion of the total funds to the big cities and regions where we knew that the risks were highest. And then weentified a second category of cities, what we call tier two cities, which we opened up for some competitive bidding or competitive grant applications so that we could give some money out to other communities, again based on the way it would be most efficiently used.
What you'll see if you look at the numbers from last year is that 90 percent of the total mass transit funding went to the tier one big cities and urban areas, which of course, received the lion's share.
But an additional 19 urban areas shared the balance of the remaining funds. So what you would expect, and what I think Congress expected happened. Cities like New York, Chicago with very large systems and particular vulnerabilities and high consequences got the lion's share of the money. But we also were able to give some money to boost basic capabilities in other systems, particularly where they were able to demonstrate that they had very good use to which that money could be put.
We did the same thing with port security grants. We expanded our list of ports that would be eligible to compete, but we did capture the highest risk ports with a significant share of the money. That is putting the money where the risk is, which is what I think again the public wants and where Congress has directed us to move.
Another thing we've done is increasingly focus on regionalization. We know that threats don't comfortably come confined to the political line drawing that describes what falls within one political jurisdiction or another political jurisdiction. Threats are risk-based, and the consequences of threats are risk-based -- I'm sorry region-based. And that means we have to look regionally at what we doing to deal with risk. And of course, that was vividly exhibited on September 11th and in Katrina, where the spill-over effect of an event in one jurisdiction was acutely felt in multiple other jurisdictions. So we've begun to look at regionalization as an important positive element in determining where we put money. And we've used that, particularly in our urban areas security initiative grants.
Finally, I want to say there was a lot of criticism last year about some of the microscopic detail that seemed to go into the analysis distinguishing between one area and another in terms of risk. And I think as we've looked at that, we've come to the conclusion that perhaps there was a little too much bean counting and a little less standing back and applying common sense to look at the total picture, so I think this year as we move forward, we're going to look to definitions of risk that have fewer microscopic calculations and broader, more easily understandable rules of principle that explain why we are allocating risk the way we are among the various urban areas or states that are competing for money.
So using these principles, which are tiring to put the most money where the highest risk is; regionalization, which is looking at the impact of risk on a region and not really on a political jurisdiction; and clarity and principle-based risk analysis, as opposed to a lot of microscopic bean counting, I think we're going to have a system that is more understandable and more transparent. But there's one additional piece which I think is going to be very good news for all of you, which is it's got to be a user-friendly process.
This year we're going to get grant guidance for all of our grants out this coming month, the month of December, which is going to be earlier than we've ever done it before. And there's a reason that I've directed that we do it. It's because in the past when we've gotten the grant guidance out later in the cycle, those applying for grants have put together proposals, and they've tended to be accepted or rejected almost on what I would call a pass-fail basis.
And I've heard the complaints about it, looking like we're playing kind of a pop quiz type of game with local communities. They have to try to guess what we're looking for, and if they guess wrong, they don't get the money that they think they're entitled to, and that they may be entitled to.
So again, having taken that critique into mind, we've looked at the process and said, how do we make this more of a give-and-take. By getting the guidance out earlier this year, we're going to give you an opportunity to submit your proposals in enough time for us to do one turn-around and get back to you with a critique of what we think is good and what we think is not good. That will give you