Trump administration cuts New York City's anti-terrorism funding days after skyscraper attack

The Guardian

a day ago

The Trump administration said it would cut terrorism prevention funding for New York City, according to a grant notice posted days after a gunman killed four people inside a Manhattan skyscraper.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) stated in a grant notice posted on Friday that New York City would receive $64m less this year from its urban area security fund. The amount was listed in a single line of an 80-page Fema notice on the grant program.
The US Congress created the program to help cities prevent terrorist attacks.
'It makes absolutely no sense, and no justification has been given to cut NY's allocation given the rise in the threat environment,' a spokesperson for the New York state division of homeland security and emergency services said in a statement on Monday afternoon.
Manhattan has been the site of two attacks on high-profile corporate executives in the last year. The most recent attack came from a gunman armed with an assault-style rifle in late July, who killed four people inside an office building that houses the headquarters of the NFL and several major financial firms.
New York governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, highlighted the attack in her late July letter to the US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, asking why the Trump administration had not announced the amounts each city would receive from the program this year. Fema is part of DHS.
Noem's office did not respond to two messages from Reuters asking why the federal government cut New York's funding.
In December 2024, the chief executive of insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was gunned down on the street in Manhattan in a targeted attack. And security has been particularly tight in New York City ever since the al-Qaida terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that killed almost 3,000 people in lower Manhattan when Islamist extremists flew hijacked passenger jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
Fema uses 'an analysis of relative risk of terrorism' to decide how much money cities will receive, according to the grant notice posted on Friday. The agency may change the amounts later, according to the notice.
In 2023, the agency considered city visitor counts, population density and proximity to international borders, among other factors, to determine the totals, according to a report signed by then Fema administrator Deanne Criswell.
Fema has been decreasing terrorism prevention money for New York City each year since at least fiscal year 2022. The drop is much more drastic this year at 41% year-over-year.
The New York City police department has used the funding in the past to pay for the Domain Awareness System, a network of cameras, license plate readers and detection devices, according to a 2016 statement from the former mayor Bill de Blasio's office.