Former Homeland Security Assistant: ‘Obama Slashed Budget For Domestic Bombing Prevention By 45 Per Cent’

Apr 16, 2013 3 Comments Jake Hammer
Excerpted from DAILY MAIL
Barack Obama’s administration has cut the budget nearly in half for preventing domestic bombings, MailOnline can reveal.
Under President George W. Bush, the Department of Homeland Security had $20 million allocated for preventing the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) by terrorists working inside the United States. The current White House has cut that funding down to $11 million.
That assessment comes from Robert Liscouski, a former Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection, in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15 that killed three Americans and injured at least 173 others.
He told MailOnline that the Obama-era DHS is, on the whole, about as well-positioned as it was during the Bush administration to handle the aftermath of the April 15 bombings in Boston, ‘but the Obama administration has continued to cut the budget for offices such as the Office for Bombing Prevention from $20 million started under Bush, to $11 million today.’

Robert Liscouski was the first Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection, and was responsible for creating the Office of Infrastructure Protection Directorate. That sub-agency’s job included protecting U.S. sites from improvised explosives, and it later spun off the Office for Bombing Prevention

‘Comparatively,’ he added, ‘the Defense Department’s Joint IED Defeat Organization had a budget of $1 billion per year focused on preventing IEDs in the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters.’
‘Clearly more money needs to be focused on countering domestic IEDs,’ Liscouski concluded.
He is now a partner at Edge 360, a security and intelligence consultancy.
The Office for Bombing Prevention (OBP) was created in 2003 when the Department of Homeland Security was founded. Its original name was the WMD/Bombing Prevention Unit, and it was part of the department’s Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate.
The sub-agency was renamed the Office for Bombing Prevention in 2006, according to a 2009 DHS briefing booklet obtained by MailOnline and marked ‘FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY.’
Today the OBP describes its mission as ‘enhanc[ing] the Nation’s ability to prevent, protect against, respond to, and mitigate the terrorist use of explosives against critical infrastructure, the private sector, and Federal, State, local, tribal, and territorial entities.’
Its website says it works to ‘coordinate national and intergovernmental bombing prevention efforts’ and ‘enhance counter-IED capabilities.’

In February, President Obama issued a National Policy for Countering Improvised Explosives that now governs OBP. ‘We must not become complacent,’ he wrote
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