By Devlin Barret
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Homeland Security officials slashed anti-terror funding to New York City and Washington last year after they decided to devote more attention and resources to the nation's suburbs, congressional investigators said Wednesday.

The Government Accountability Office sent lawmakers a 49-page analysis of the decision-making at the Homeland Security Department that led to 40 percent cuts in 2006 to funding for the two U.S. cities that were hit hardest in the 2001 terror attacks.

Many lawmakers criticized the agency last year for cutting both cities' anti-terror grants — a loss of $83 million for New York and $31 million for the nation's capital region — in a program designed specifically to help cities at the greatest risk.

The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, examined the funding decisions at the request of two California Democrats, Rep. Doris Matsui and Sen. Barbara Boxer, who were upset that San Diego and Sacramento were in danger of losing such funding entirely.

Investigators zeroed in on a key change the agency made in handing out dollars — for the first time, the agency widened the "footprint" of eligible cities to include suburbs.

"As a consequence of this change in the footprint, DHS officials concluded that the relative risk of New York City and the National Capital Region declined compared to those of other urban areas," the GAO analysis found.

One longtime critic of the cuts, Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., called that description "the 12th different explanation we've gotten, and it still doesn't add up."

A DHS spokesman did not immediately comment.

The GAO cites as an example how inclusion of a suburban area with a nuclear power plant may affect the agency's risk calculations, but it is not clear how including the suburbs would hurt Washington's funding, since the city's outlying suburbs include numerous key government buildings, including the Pentagon, which was struck in 2001.

The DHS process for awarding billions of dollars in anti-terror grants to cities and states has been a target for criticism ever since the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Investigators said DHS officials sometimes could offer little explanation for how they reached certain decisions.

"DHS has a limited understanding of the effects of the judgments made in estimating risk that influenced eligibility" and funding in 2006, the GAO declared, adding that all funding decisions were ultimately approved by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

That was little comfort to the agency's critics.

Boxer said the analysis confirms suspicions that the grant program for high-threat cities "was arbitrary, ineffective and just plain wrong. How can we secure our homeland against terrorists when our government can't even determine what cities are most threatened?"

The GAO cautioned that's not easy to do. Deciding anti-terror grant levels is "challenging, given uncertainties such as the limited data on actual attacks and understanding the capabilities, intentions and adaptability of terrorists," the investigators wrote.

For New York, talk of a wider footprint resulting in less grant money could cause more local frustration. DHS officials announced last month that the New York and northern New Jersey areas would be combined for the first time in the agency's high-threat grant analysis. Chertoff insisted the change does not mean an automatic drop in funding for the city.