Obsession versus Caution

Cuts at the bureau

On September 11, 2001, America was viciously attacked by a terrorist group. We know the results. My heart remains heavy at the memory, one etched horribly in our minds forever. We shifted our priorities after that day, even creating a whole new federal bureaucracy – Homeland Security – instead of trying to perform a ground-up reconstruction of the agencies we already had, like the Department of Justice, National Security Agency, etc. Pushed “emergency operations” like FEMA into that lumbering morass, and the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina showed us the consequences of that move. Federal bureaucracies had a new player to fight for turf. Government efficiency plunged, and we still have miles to go.

The government continued to spend money, a new and expensive war effort, shifting its agencies and budgets away from the mundane problems of America , deregulating the economy, deficits ballooned, and people began to believe that the American Dream should follow the example of their federal government, borrow and spend today and worry about the consequences “later.”

Money flowed into federal efforts, but in the name of “hey, we're doing something to reign in spending,” the government under-funded repairing infrastructure, scientific research (a job-creating initiative), elevating our school children to higher global standards so they could earn enough some day to pay off their parents’ borrowings, and cut some pretty basic protections out of the heart of some our most necessary and prestigious federal agencies.

I was reading the New York Times this morning (among many news sources), and I thought the above graph (from the Times) and the information below might hit home for my readers – as thousands of financial misconduct and fraud cases, even before this meltdown, some in the many millions of dollars, escaped investigation and prosecution because most of our assets were deployed on the “war on terrorism.” Could Al Qaeda have inflicted as much damage to America as we did by our own financial irresponsibility and a failure properly to deploy our resources?

The Times: “Since 2004, F.B.I. officials have warned that mortgage fraud posed a looming threat, and the bureau has repeatedly asked the Bush administration for more money to replenish the ranks of agents handling nonterrorism investigations, according to records and interviews. But each year, the requests have been denied, with no new agents approved for financial crimes, as policy makers focused on counterterrorism.

“According to previously undisclosed internal F.B.I. data, the cutbacks have been particularly severe in staffing for investigations into white-collar crimes like mortgage fraud, with a loss of 625 agents, or 36 percent of its 2001 levels.”

There’s not much more to say. The answers are that obvious.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.