Responsep Sj_343 41..46 Resounding Agreement

In their final section, Eller and Gerber note that the field of public policy “has perhaps paid insufficient attention” to the “remarkably fecund issue area” of counterterrorism policy, and they further suggest that explorations in this area provide not only “substantive benefit” but also “theoretic development” (p. 36). I couldn’t agree more, except that I would drop the word “perhaps.” In the early period after 9/11 it was understandable that there was a tendency to fashion policy and to spend in haste and confusion, and maybe even hysteria. After all, as noted in my article (p. 2), intelligence was estimating at the time that there were as many as 5,000 al-Qaeda operatives at loose in the country, and, as Mayor Rudy Giuliani reflected later, “Anybody any one of these security experts, including myself would have told you on September 11, 2001, we’re looking at dozens and dozens and multiyears of attacks like this” (CNN, July 22, 2005). But in 2006, five years after 9/11—bywhich time these claims had clearly proven to be wrong and after the federal government had increased its expenditures for dealing with terrorism by some $136 billion—a senior economist at the Department of Homeland Security noted wistfully that “We really don’t know a whole lot about the overall costs and benefits of homeland security” (Anderson, 2006). The Office of Management and Budget has recommended for years, of course, that all proposed federal regulations use such assessments, and they are routinely conducted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, and other agencies. Moreover, in 2004, the 9/11 Commission specifically called on the government to assess the risks and cost-effectiveness of terrorism security measures (Kean, 2004, chap. 12). Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff entered office in 2005 strongly advocating a The Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2010