Pork, risk, or reaction? The determinants of US counterterrorist funding

ABSTRACT

A wealth of literature exists on the relationship between a country’s domestic politics and its counterterrorism policies, yet few examine this relationship in the US. Past studies examining counterterrorism spending in the US find that domestic politics have little impact and that funding is distributed to the states largely as a function of its risk from a terrorist attack. Yet these studies suffer a number of shortcomings, including limited data on counterterrorist funding and a superficial conceptualisation of the variables that measure domestic politics. Using data on US outlays from the Department of Homeland Security Grants Program from 2003 to 2018, this study seeks to illuminate the process of counterterrorist spending in the US by reconciling three separate sets of predictors in the literature. Specifically, is counterterrorist spending distributed according to legislative politics (pork), genuine, rationally calculated population vulnerability (risk), or public fear in the wake of particularly notorious terrorist attacks (reaction)? The results support and expand the existing literature in that risk remains an influential variable, though grant distribution is still affected by political incentives. Finally, states do tend to see an influx of funds in reaction to terrorist attacks, though the source of the group plays no role.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorism
• counterterrorism
• funding
• Homeland Security grants

Data availability statement

Data available at https://kylekattelman.wixsite.com/kylekattelman

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Gimpel, Lee, and Thorpe (2009) find evidence of this with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which was passed in response to the exogenous shock of the financial crisis of 2008.

2. In particular, Representative Harold “Hal” Rogers (R-KY) has brought over $200 million in DHS grants back to his state in the three years since the panel was created, which is approximate to the amount New York City received in 2005 (Kaplan 2006).

3. For example, the Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention Programme (LETPP) was a separate line item until 2009, when it was determined that SHSGP and UASI will dedicate 25% of their funds to its continuance (US Department of Homeland Security FY 2009 Overview). Other programmes, such as the Metropolitan Medical Response System (MMRS) and the Citizen Corps Program (CCP), discontinued in 2012.

4. Specifically, the SHSGP and UASI (US Government Accountability Office 2008).

5. For example, state and local investments in counterterrorism, dual-use programs and spending, private donations, classified spending, and economic losses and secondary effects stemming from the long-term cost of homeland security.

6. There are also additional filtering criteria that allow for customisation of the definition – 1. Act must be aimed at attaining a political economic, religious, or social goal. 2. There must be evidence of intention to coerce or convey a message to a larger audience. 3. The action must be outside of the context of legitimate warfare activities. All three criteria were selected to obtain the data for this study.

7. This value is simply the result of multiplying the DHS committee membership coefficient of 0.35 on the value of a state having a member of the DHS committee, which is 1. Since the dependent variable is in millions of dollars, the coefficient is multiplied by 1,000,000 to generate the predicted dollar amount.

8. Interpreting interaction effects must take into account the separate coefficients as well as their interactions. Hence, we add the coefficient for GOP majority (−0.59) with DHS membership (0.35) with the interaction term between the two (−0.63).

9. This is compiled by averaging the three Cardinal coefficients (i.e. 0.31, 0.39, and 0.27).

10. Results presented in the online Appendix.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kyle Kattelman

Kyle Kattelman is associate professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University.