In the run-up to the grim 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York City, the Department of Homeland Security, under hapless Secretary Markwayne Mullin and a one-time New Yorker president, has still not disbursed about $87 million in counterterrorism funding out of a total $187 million it has owed New York since last year, when it unlawfully tried to cut the money as a result of Donald Trump’s unrelated grievances with the state, including over immigration protections.
Mullin was instead here this week to tout ICE arrest numbers and chastise New York while the department he leads leaves local law enforcement and emergency response hanging. This is another example of Trump’s erroneous belief that he is the king (or perhaps the CEO) of the United States. The funds appropriated by Congress for various purposes are the public treasury, collected and disbursed by its elected representatives for various public purposes as set out in law, not Trump’s to allocate as he sees fit.
Over and over, he has attempted to slash funding for education, for transit, for disaster recovery, always to blue cities and states in what is clearly a personal vendetta derived from his anger that they did not support him. In Trump’s vision of America, public funding and public services are patronage in exchange for fealty to the king. Fortunately, the courts have mostly slapped him down, but having to run to court every time Trump tries to block allocated funds is itself a drain on local resources. Let’s stop playing these games and give New York the rest of the money.
These are not general-purpose funds slated to sit in some government account while we figure out what to do with them. Mullin and the feds are stealing anti-terror resources from the NYPD and FDNY. The money is intended to pay for specific things for which they’ve already been earmarked, including bomb disposal units, radios and equipment to deal with the eventuality of a radiological threat. Such circumstances are extraordinarily rare but, as we are painfully reminded this upcoming week, certainly not impossible.
It’s all grand-standing until something happens and our systems are not properly funded; what is Trump going to say to New Yorkers if there are credible bomb threats and the federal funding to quickly dispatch teams has lapsed? What is going to be his excuse if, god forbid, there really is some attack on the city of his birth? Shrug and blame it on someone else, surely; this is the same man who on 9/11 itself couldn’t help but brag (incorrectly) that his was now the tallest building in Lower Manhattan.
Of course, the president has more broadly ensured that the Department of Homeland Security is focused on everything but making us safer; in fact, quite the opposite, as DHS steps back from efforts to prevent cyberattacks on U.S. soil and providing aid during emergencies. Instead, it is focused on overreaching its authority to spy on journalists and nonprofits and hounding communities of Haitians and others that it itself stripped of existing legal status.
The department created as a direct result of the 9/11 attacks has in the two-decades-plus since its creation been twisted into a political arm of an authoritarian White House. If it can’t do the job, the least it can do is give New York the funding to do it ourselves.