Wealth & Money Quote by Michael Chertoff

Chertoff’s sentence is the bureaucratic version of a hard stare: you don’t get to win funding just by naming a threat. In the post-9/11 homeland security universe he helped build, “risk” became a kind of all-purpose currency, a word that can conjure urgency, fear, and political cover in a single syllable. His move here is to devalue that currency unless it’s backed by a plan.

The specific intent is managerial and defensive. He’s describing a process meant to prevent security budgets from turning into blank checks for agencies that can recite hazards but can’t explain outcomes. The phrasing is telling: “identified the risk” sounds clinical, even virtuous, but he immediately punctures the self-congratulation. The real question is not whether danger exists (it always does) but whether spending can plausibly change the odds. That’s the quiet pivot from a politics of anxiety to a politics of accountability.

Subtext: he’s policing incentives. If money follows risk alone, everyone has an incentive to inflate worst-case scenarios, broaden definitions, and keep the threat level rhetorically high. By demanding a “meaningful use,” he’s trying to force specificity: what capability gets built, what vulnerability gets reduced, what trade-off gets accepted. It’s also a subtle admission that “risk-based” policymaking is easy to sell and hard to operationalize. The line carries the weight of a leader who knows that in national security, budgets can expand faster than clarity, and that “we gave you money” is not the same as “we bought safety.”