Money and Politics

No place suffered more severe of a psychic blow from the Sept. 11 hijackings than New York City. One chilling dimension of the attacks illustrates how complicated the recovery effort became. Death certificates were issued for 2,746 people in the wake of the tragedy. But four years after 9/11 when the unparalleled effort to identify […]

Washington State set the standard for transparency and completeness in responding to open-records requests with information about homeland security grant spending for this project. We even used computer records supplied by authorities there to show others how we’d like to receive the material. Officials at the state’s Military Department, which is in charge of distributing […]

With help from federal homeland security grants, the state of Alabama earned national praise in 2007 after it rolled out an innovative program known as Virtual Alabama. It’s a database of existing satellite imagery and aerial photography, such as surveillance footage from the state’s transportation department, that enables emergency-response personnel to better visualize areas of […]

Veteran Republican Rep. Hal Rogers of eastern Kentucky’s 5th District has a well-earned reputation for delivering to his constituents a bounty of earmarks – the type of government spending widely maligned by critics as wasteful, unregulated pork. A former chairman of the homeland security appropriations subcommittee, Rogers also excelled at attracting new jobs to his […]

Year after year, state auditors have pointed to bookkeeping problems at North Carolina’s Department of Crime Control and Public Safety, an agency in charge of distributing homeland security and disaster recovery grants. But each year after returning to have a look at previously reported issues, the auditors had to append this statement to each one: […]

The nation’s first homeland security secretary, Tom Ridge, in 2003 pointed to West Virginia as an example of preparedness done right while standing on the steps of the state capital building in Charleston. “Your regional approach and your use of common training, exercises and equipment is setting an example that the other states must follow,” […]

When presidential candidate John McCain in 2008 announced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, we decided to have a look at how her hometown of Wasilla and the surrounding Matanuska-Susitna Borough handled millions of dollars in federal homeland security grants. State officials had already supplied us with documents in response to a public-records […]

Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal made national headlines in early 2009 when he declared that his state would reject as much as $100 million worth of stimulus funds contained in President Barack Obama’s economic recovery package due to provisions Jindal warned would lead to a tax increase on businesses. “Democratic leaders say their legislation will […]

Temperatures reached brutal lows. Repeated blizzards shut down the highway system leaving road crews working 24-hour days. Motorists were trapped, and massive snow drifts virtually buried houses. Thousands of livestock expired. Then snowmelt caused near-biblical flooding. More than 2,200 square miles of land were soaked in water, an area the size of two Rhode Islands. […]

In our profile of Pennsylvania, we described how emergency managers there faced tough criticism over the poor handling of a winter storm in 2007 that led to what Gov. Ed Rendell publicly described as a “total breakdown in communications.” He heard about the storm’s severity from stranded citizens, not officials. Pennsylvania wasn’t alone. Despite having […]