This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 21st, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown, who says

Homeland Security needs to start and end at the federal level.

Not Matt Mayer, author of the new book, Homeland Security and Federalism,

protecting America from outside the beltway.

A former Department of Homeland Security official mayor believes that since most resources for homeland security are actually held at the local level,

locals should be calling more of the shots. We spoke in June. You suggest that we are federalizing

too much of Homeland Security functions. Why is that? Well because I mean what we've

seen is after 9-11, there was, you could imagine a reasonable response to say,

wow, we've got a huge problem here, how do we deal with it?

And rather than take the lessons of history where we had an enormous civil defense capacity really

come out of the state and local level from colonial all the way through the Cold War, we took

a model where we said we're going to create this new department and we're going to federalize

more and more of that domestic security envelope.

And so what we've seen is whether it's in FEMA over the last 16 years, we've seen an

enormous federalization of natural disasters where, you know, in the period from 1981 to 1993, you were averaging about 43 disaster declarations per year.

During the Clinton administration, that doubled to 89 declarations per year,

and during the Bush administration, that went up to 130 declarations per year,

which is about one declaration every 2.8 days. This year the last I checked were on pace for

approximately 170 declarations which would be a record for FEMA. The last

highest number was 157 declarations back in 1996 an election year where we had to

spread the money around in order to try to improve the chances of re-election for the

president. And so we've seen that federalization of disasters which has created a problem where FEMA spends

...