Government Spending essays

Government Spending essays How resources are allocated within a program signal a great deal about priorities. In the wake of the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Murrah Federal Building in the United States and that sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, both the executive and legislative branches of government focused considerable attention on preventing and responding to a WMD terrorist attack. In the context of a federal budget that exceeds a trillion dollars, a natural question to pose is whether $10 billion dollars allocated to address the range of terrorism challenges is too much, to little, or just enough. As the GAO repeatedly noted, part of the problem with the current executive branch funding approach to terrorism is the lack of threat and risk assessments that would suggest priorities and appropriate countermeasures. Rooting government funding more rigorously seems vitally important if every dollar spent to address the terrorism problem will render the maximum amount of public safety. The executive and legislative branches of government are equally responsible for heralding the critical need to address the threat, but neither body has made a cogent or somber assessment of the threat. Most of the executive and legislative branch activities to counter terrorism seems based on the vulnerability of American society and forces abroad, not on an assessment of the threat. Given the openness of American society, the country is potentially infinitely vulnerable to terrorist use of WMD. Even if the chances of terrorist use of WMD are extremely low, the consequences of such an attack may result on a scale hard to imagine. Understandably, executive and legislative branch activities seem designed to meet the threat forcefully enough to address genuine needs and send a signal to the American people and the world that the US government is taking action to thwart the WMD terrorism problem should it present itself. ...