The impossible job of homeland security is apparent to anyone who considers the number of ways terrorists could attack any large group of Americans on their own turf. Subways and buses are now obviously vulnerable, joining airplanes and trains. Or, if people aren’t the immediate targets then it could be fuel lines, transportation systems, government facilities and so on. But for all the complex, multi-layered, interlocking means of protection necessary to attempt to protect the nation, the one measure politicians and pundits use to judge effectiveness is money. Specifically, who gets the funding?

The answer is that no one gets enough. There’s never going to be enough money because the number of possible risks is endless, but the funding is even lower now than previously. More to the point, senators representing states with large urban areas believe too much is going to low-risk places – places such as Maine. When the Senate passes a bill that sends security money to all states, as happened recently, the sophisticated will tsk-tsk and say there goes the Senate again, loading up the rural pork barrel when lives are at stake.

The breakdown actually is this: 60 percent of Homeland Security grants are distributed based on risk. Of the remaining 40 percent, each state gets a minimum share of the funding (in ’06) but not all minimums are equal because they too are based on risk. California, for instance, gets more than five times the amount of smaller states; New York and Texas get three times. The Congressional Research Service concludes that 82 percent of the total grant money is risk-based.

Perhaps that’s not enough, maybe it should be 85 percent: The Senate debate ranged from guaranteeing each state at least 0.75 percent of funding down to 0.25 percent before settling on 0.55 percent. The formula isn’t magical, but it clearly should contain a minority of money for basic infrastructure that all states are required to have.

A new computer for an emergency-response network costs the same in Wisconsin as it does in New York. Yet the most common complaint from urban areas is that the per-person spending in rural areas is considerably higher than in urban ones. Sometimes, it is, but it is also irrelevant because people are not protected individually; they are protected as groups and if a group is smaller, the per-person cost is higher: That computer in Wisconsin will cost more per person.

Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman, the chairman and ranking Democratic member respectively on the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, wrote the funding legislation recently passed by the Senate. As they recently pointed out, the legislation sets new standards for what can be purchased with the money and establishes tougher auditing standards to make certain the standards are followed. That could do more to improve spending than further tinkering with the formula.

No one knows what an adequate amount of money is for homeland security, but all states should receive something to help meet new federal rules, something rural states would find more difficult to do if their share is whittled down for the small portion it is now.