Success Quote by David E. Price

Price’s sentence is the kind of Washington warning that sounds procedural until you hear the anxiety underneath it: the fear that “homeland security” has become a single-issue religion. Written in the long shadow of 9/11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, it pushes back against a budgetary and bureaucratic habit that treats terrorism as the premier threat and everything else as secondary or local.

The key phrase is “trade-off.” It’s not just about money, though appropriations are implied; it’s about attention, doctrine, and institutional muscle memory. After a spectacular attack, governments tend to fund what can be named, dramatized, and blamed on an enemy. Natural disasters are messier: no villain, no satisfying victory lap, just prevention, infrastructure, and competence. Price is trying to puncture the false binary that forces agencies to choose between the cinematic threat (terrorists) and the statistically inevitable one (storms, floods, pandemics).

His subtext is also intra-governmental: “additional steps” reads like a nudge at colleagues who prefer symbolic toughness over unglamorous preparedness. The clause “protect the homeland” is rhetorically savvy, borrowing the post-9/11 language of patriotism while widening what counts as protection. He’s arguing that resilience is security, and that failure will come not from lack of will, but from misaligned priorities - the kind that look strong on cable news and collapse when the levees break.