Of course it does.
In "What Does Homeland Security Spending Buy?" -- published in 2005 by the American Enterprise Institute -- Veronique de Rugy provides clear evidence of how the nation's security resources have been squandered. For example:
• $500,000 spent by Outagamie, Wis. -- population 165,000 and hardly a top al-Qaida target -- to buy chemical suits, generators, rescue saws, disaster-response trailers, emergency lighting, escape hoods and a bomb-disposal vehicle.
• $30,000 used by officials in Lake County, Tenn., to help a high school buy a defibrillator to have on hand for a baseball tournament.
• $557,400 awarded to North Pole, a town in Alaska with a population of 1,570, for homeland security rescue and communication equipment.
• $98,000 spent on a training course in incident management by the Tecumseh Fire Department in Lenawee County, Mo., that no one attended.
• $63,000 spent on a decontamination unit that ended up in storage in a warehouse in rural Washington because the state didn't have a hazmat team to use it.
• $58,000 for a rescue vehicle capable of boring through concrete in Colchester, a Vermont town with a population of 18,000.
There's also anti-terrorism money for D.C.'s summer jobs program and port protection in Martha's Vineyard. "At Christmas, the Department of Homeland Security handed out about $153 million for programs offering food and shelter for the poor, to be spent in 2004," reports Rugy. Perhaps our security experts viewed the homeless as potential al-Qaida recruits.
That, and the Mayor is a putz!