Bloomberg on counter-terror financing…
By: Stephen CollierNew York Mayor Michael Bloomberg testified in Senate hearings today about the financing formulas for DHS funding. He has raised the same issues in prior hearings. The question is whether a new Congress means that these criticisms might actually go somewhere.
January 9th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
While generally Bloomberg’s preference for risk-based funding is certainly right, one statement toward the end of the article was interesting. He said “Our corn crop is very important. We can’t eat in this country without it. But homeland security monies shouldn’t go to protect the corn crop because that’s not what terrorists are going to try to attack.” While it may be correct that the corn crop is an unlikely terrorist target, there is a question about whether homeland security funding should be based on “terrorist threats” or “generic vulnerabilities.” In other words, the corn crop may be vulnerable to floods, poor harvests, or global warming, for example, and one could plan for such things. Though Bloomberg may in fact be talking about more specific irrational spending, like “terrorist-proofing” granaries or something.
January 9th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
wow. the corn comparison is interesting, given how outrageously heavily subsidized that industry is. I think its safe to say that we could lose half of the corn produced in any given year and the biggest disaster would be the end of the obesity epidemic from the disappearance of high fructose corn syrup. But the flip side is the idea, perhaps, of the production of surplus safety, i.e. what will have been produced by financing formulas. What is the vital systems equivalent of corn-fed cattle, HFCS in everything and Biodiese?l Is there a new Keynsianism?
January 9th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Just checking in to see if I can start taking part.
The corn supply is one thing and the monies going to various yacht clubs is another.
It will be interesting to see what the new formulas will be.
January 9th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
I have blogged!!! Therefore I am.
January 9th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
For those who missed it, the current issue of the American Anthropologist is a special issue on Katrina.
And Laura Nader says the newsletter is fully of interesting comments.
January 10th, 2007 at 1:28 am
When Bloomberg talks about “risk-based” funding (and contrasts it with “pork”), he really means “threat-based” funding: ie. NYC faces the biggest threat of a terrorist attack, so it should get the most funds. He is (in his testimony during last summer’s UASI controversy, for example) uninterested in the idea that risk = “threat” + “vulnerability” + “consequences”, which is the ostensible basis of DHS allocation decisions. On the other hand, DHS has not made public exactly how it calculates things like vulnerability, which seems to involve adding up the various “critical assets” (for example, flea markets and popcorn stands in Indiana) a given region has.
January 10th, 2007 at 7:01 am
As Andy argues, there seem to be two different rationalities of risk at stake. At any rate, I’m not so sure about the corn example in Bloomberg’s argument. Consider the recent E.coli cases in the US. In the past couples of decades, Americans have doubled the amount of vegetables and fruits that they consume. High centralization of production makes the system vulnerable. As an article in the New York Times recently pointed out: “While the meat industry is required to follow rules set down by the Department of Agriculture for processing and slaughter, produce is not subject to similar regulations by the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the safety of fruits and vegetables.” Additionally, the FDA “has little regulatory authority over the produce industry and has fewer than 2,000 inspectors for more than 12,000 facilities, 250 inspectors fewer than in 2003. The Agriculture Department has 7,600 inspectors for 6,000 facilities.
Bon appetit!
January 11th, 2007 at 10:42 am
I am not entirely convinced about the “threat” v. “risk” distinction. Risk is in part a function of threat. So there may be cases in which they use something like an “inventory” of critical assets as a proxy for “risk” assessment because they don’t know how to integrate different kinds of data. But I don’t think that makes it a fundamentally different rationality. In any case, I think we all agree that there are a set of distinctions at work here that are worth working through more explicitly. What it really brings home is that we need to think more seriously about what “risk” actually means if we are not in a archival/actuarial mode of knowledge and assessment.
January 12th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
I think that in this case, Bloomberg isn’t actually using a “risk rationality” per se. He’s just defending NYC funding on the grounds that it a priori faces the biggest terrorist threat. Whereas DHS tried to justify its initial cuts to NYC and DC based on a “risk-based” formula. What “risk” means for DHS in its funding formula is quite concrete, though obscure in its actual implementation: “threat” + “consequences” + “vulnerability”. I think they get this from some strand of the field of systems analysis/ operations research. This is different from how EPA and FDA calculate the risk of damage from chemical exposure or pharmaceutical use.
January 12th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
One of the obvious interesting questions is when “vulnerability” is inserted into risk formulas. The classic formula is likelihood + consequence. In principle, one would think that “consequence” is a function, in part, of vulnerability. Or that vulnerability would be defined by consequence. But in fact, what we are seeing is a de-coupling of the idea of vulnerability from the effect of specific events — it is an intrinsic property of systems themselves. I think that this de-coupling — and the movement from risk=likelihood+consequence to risk=threat+consequence+vulnerability is worth pursuing further. There is, by the way, nothing remotely exceptional in DHS’s definition. It is all over the literature. (RAND’s basic analytical document on the funding formula (called “Estimating Terrorism Risk” http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2005/RAND_MG388.pdf) contains this; interestingly, they argue that a truly rational distribution formula would have to include an assessment of the marginal impact of spending in a given area in *reducing* vulnerability. So, in other words, all of this discussion is on the “need” side of vulnerability management, but nothing on the “impact” side. So they are saying: to really have an economically rational framework, you need to add the impact of spending so that you can really understand cost, benefit, and opportunity cost of any allocational decision. So this is a remapping of a novel risk assessment formula *back* onto the matrix of economic rationality.)