First responders still short-changed
Even a WorldCom – excuse me – MCI accountant may not be able to solve this one. A new report by a well-respected research group says that first responders need $98.4 billion more than planned over the next five years.
Former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H., and Richard Clarke, President Bush’s former cybersecurity chief, led the 20-member task force that wrote the report, “Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared.” The study by the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan research group, said the federal government is expected to provide about $27 billion for first responders during the next five years. State and local agencies should kick in about $26 billion to $75 billion.
Not only is that not enough money, the report outlined some frightening problems. On average, for example, fire departments across the country have only enough radios to equip half the firefighters on a shift, and breathing apparatuses for only one third. Only 10 percent of fire departments in the United States have the personnel and equipment to respond to a building collapse. Police departments in cities across the country do not have the protective gear to safely secure a site following an attack with weapons of mass destruction. Public health labs in most states lack basic equipment and expertise to respond appropriately to a chemical or biological attack, and 75 percent of state laboratories report being overwhelmed by too many testing requests. Most cities do not even have the equipment to determine the type of hazardous materials responders may be facing.
There are two major obstacles hampering America’s emergency preparedness efforts, according to the report. First, it is impossible to know precisely what is needed and how much it will cost due to the lack of preparedness standards. Second, funding for emergency responders has been sidetracked and stalled due to the politics of the appropriations process, the slow distribution of funds by federal agencies, and bureaucracy.
The report outlines a number of steps needed to solve the problems and raise the appropriate amount of money. Those include such things as requiring the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services to work with state and local agencies and professional associations to establish standards and guidelines for emergency preparedness. The standards must be flexible enough to allow priorities based on local needs, and a hard deadline such as 2007 for establishment of standards is needed.
But perhaps the best line of the 60-plus-page report is that Congress must allocate “resources based less on dividing the spoils and more on addressing identified threats and vulnerabilities.”
While the report provides a number of thoughtful and even resourceful ideas to move down a path of rational allocation of funds for first responders, and it is worth a try, the task force would have better luck springing a creative WorldCom accountant from a club fed to solve the problem than forcing Congress to give up its pork.
