Homeland security funding for New York City is lacking

Research conducted at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, has discovered what lawmakers and law enforcement officials have known for years: New York City is getting less then its fair share of homeland security funding.

The team at Northwestern created budget allocation models that examined the budgets for fiscal years 2005 to 2009 in 10 major cities across the United States, including New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Houston, Newark and Seattle

Using a variety of terrorist attack scenarios -- in which budget restraints and surpluses would be most crucial in terms of real world applicability -- the research team discovered that New York receive approximately 30 percent of the total funding allocated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for these 10 cities, but it should be receiving 33 to 49 percent, an increase of between $15 million and $92 million.

“Our new methodology, called robust-weighted sum optimization, offers a different perspective on how Homeland Security funds might be allocated,” said Sanjay Mehrota, the project’s lead researcher. “Ultimately, we would like to bring this method to the decision-making processes of Homeland Security and other organization.”

The report, which was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Office of Naval Research, also discovered that Chicago -- home to President Barack Obama -- is under-funded by about $10 to $17 million, while Los Angeles was over-funded by $27 to $36 million dollars.

The researches discovered that the remaining seven cities each received the appropriate amount of funding, based on their needs and according to the model.

To read the full report, click here.