Several weeks ago, Sen. Tom Harkin spoke out on how President Bush’s recently released budget shortchanges Iowa for homeland security in preference for other high risk areas.

At the same time, the Queens Chronicle reports on how some in New York are characterizing Bush as a heartless manipulator because of how Montana gets several orders of magnitude more of money per capita (also several orders of magnitude less per square mile) for fire departments than New York City. This sums up the tug of war being fought out between the political and the practical over the homeland security money.

Given the fact that New York City has felt the brunt of two of the only successful foreign terrorist attacks on the domestic United States, it seems logical that it should receive a heavily disproportionate amount of the money. In addition, New York City still stands as the symbol of what the lowly militant Muslim fundamentalists hate the most: big city capitalism. Just as an old African Caliph might have furrowed his brow at the luxuries of Granada, so too do the lowly desert wanderers like Osama bin Laden look at New York City.

Of course, this was originally accounted for, but has since been eroded by log-rolling and hometown payoffs of those in Congress. The pork-barrel add-ons to the original Homeland Security Act in Congress are best remembered by the $5 million appropriation for roadside farmer’s markets in the Midwest as reported in USA Today. Just imagine a terrorist in a cave somewhere exclaiming, “Subsidies for farmers’ markets in Wisconsin? Foiled again!”

However, one other thing must be taken into account and this may anger those in New York City. The Department of Homeland Security originally annexed the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Office for Domestic Preparedness, both of which gave the DHS the responsibility to not only help local governments prepare and deal with terrorist attacks but also natural disasters.

Thus, states with large natural resources (like Montana, with its huge tracts of forests) need money for protection against natural disasters. Protecting those forests from fires is a legitimate duty of the DHS. However, this cannot explain the heavy disproportion of money going to sparsely populated areas over major cities.

As stated by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Nebraska gets roughly $15 per capita (about $20 million total), while New York State gets about $5 ($100 million total). Although North Dakota (which also received roughly $20 million in grants from DHS) has nuclear silo after nuclear silo and Montana has the potential for a very big forest fire, it is really hard to explain Nebraska getting one-fifth of the money New York does — especially considering that New York has plenty of potential for natural disasters along with the domestic lightning rod for terrorism.

So why would this happen? Why would anyone want to take money from the New York City budget that deals with terrorism and give it to Nebraska? The answer sadly is that those Congressmen that sit on the important committees are determined to distribute their share of the largesse to their constituencies around the country. This is much like how Harkin wishes Iowa, which as we all know is very high on any terrorist’s list, to get even more money from the DHS.

The effect of this distribution of pork around the nation on New York City could be staggering. As reported in the Nation, the NYFD and NYPD sent in combined requests of more than half a billion dollars for needed improvements to prepare for another terrorist attack. The roughly $100 million dollars given to the state would barely make a dent in that.

Thankfully, there is a glimmer of hope. The Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Chris Cox, R-Calif., has been fighting to change the way the DHS money is allocated, concentrating it at critical areas instead of spreading it among the states.

Unfortunately, his legislation must survive revision by several committees with members from small states, and it is doubtful if it will completely remove the waste of DHS money on small state largesse.

This seems like a good opportunity for the voters to send a message not to either party but to politicians in general. Vote the likes of Harkin out of office and show that we care more about securing this country than political payoffs.