By Yuriy Dyudyuk, USCM Intern
February 6, 2006

At the January 27 Plenary Session, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid urged Washington to pay more attention to the misallocation of Homeland Security funds.

“Any one of your cities or towns could be the next New Orleans,” said the Senator. “Wrong choices in Washington have left mayors with bigger burdens and unpaid bills,” Reid said, adding that it was a mayor, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who “was left with a city in chaos because a choice was made to transform FEMA from a first-class Cabinet organization into a jobs program for campaign donors.”

Reid said it was another mayor, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, that was “sent scrambling to find new funding” after the Department of Homeland Security took Las Vegas off of its high-risk list, “even though more people celebrated New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas than in New York’s Time Square.”

When Washington makes good choices, “like the choice in the early 1990s to put 100,000 new cops on the street, everyone benefits,” said Reid.

“We started on the right path immediately after 9/11, but in the years since, we’ve taken too many wrong turns,” Reid said, criticizing President Bush’s proposal to cut 17,000 personnel from the National Guard. By doing this, he said, “The Administration is jeopardizing the National Guard’s role in keeping America safe.” Reid also said he supported the proposed legislation providing $1.6 billion to first responders, $1 billion to the COPS program and billions of dollars more for securing rails, ports and chemical plants. “We weren’t asking for budget busting projects, we were just asking folks to make better choices about where we spend money in Washington,” Reid said. Alas, all of the proposals were rejected.

Reid asked whether it wouldn’t have been wiser to spend 10 billion dollars on protecting trains, ports and chemical plants, “rather than handing that money to HMO’s, as we did with the recent Medicare prescription drug law.” According to Reid, every three days the Administration spends $500 million in Iraq, but has spent the same amount since the London bombings to secure the nation’s railways. “If we can spend two billion dollars every week to protect the Iraqi people, we can do more to protect our people at home,” said Reid. In addition, he urged that the inability of first responders to communicate with one another should be fixed. This problem became apparent on 9/11 and during Katrina. There is also a need to increase communication between local, state and federal officials, according to the Senator.

The need to strengthen the public health system is also of paramount importance, he said. “The truth is, our health infrastructure is woefully unprepared to deal with the threats we face, including the one we see on the news every night – Avian Flu,” he said. Reid also added that public health experts see that the outbreak of a pandemic is only an issue of time, and that its results could be as devastating as those at the turn of the century. Reid added that he and his Senate colleagues joined to secure $8 billion to prepare vaccine and antiviral stockpiles, but “over half of this money was stripped from a Conference Report in the middle of the night.”

In his speech, Reid asked for a commitment to make wiser decisions about spending, so that more money ends up where it’s most necessary. “As mayors, you’re doing your best day in and day out. I believe it’s time we did the same here in Washington,” he added in conclusion.