Getting money for bioterrorism has proved to be even harder for New York. While the Bush administration says it’s willing to change the formula for some homeland-security grants, no bioterrorism money is distributed by threat level, and the administration hasn’t said it would change the formula. New York wants the money granted based on population density and risk. Amazingly, the city ranks 45th out of 54 states and municipalities in per capita funding on bioterrorism preparedness. New York Democrats often accuse the president of cheating the city on homeland-security matters, but some of the toughest criticism is quietly tucked into Bloomberg’s annual wish list, the federal legislative agenda. It points out that federal bioterror money has been reduced by $144 million. New York takes the brunt of these cuts. “Clearly, New York City bears a disproportionate risk of high-impact/high-casualty terrorist events, yet has consistently been shortchanged by federal funding by any measure of assessment,” the document notes.

Every inch of progress the city makes seems to be accompanied by a setback. Last month, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of Health and Human Services, funneled some extra bioterror money to New York, but last week, House Republicans voted to allow homeland-security funds to be used for natural disasters like floods and forest fires. This ridiculous change, the mayor argued in a letter, “would further dilute any effort to prevent and respond to international terrorism.” The legislation is being pushed by a Republican from rural Ohio.

There are real consequences to all the anti-terror money that is pickpocketed from New Yorkers. Recently, Bloomberg’s office wrote a nineteen-page memo cataloging $900 million worth of emergency-preparedness needs that are unfunded in the city. It’s a frightening list. The New York Police Department lacks $40 million needed for training its officers in counterterrorism measures. Four NYPD facilities, including One Police Plaza and the Police Lab in Jamaica, which are critical to command and control in the event of an attack, need $48 million worth of security enhancements, including bomb-blast protection and perimeter defenses. Other key NYPD sites lack bulletproof glass, anti-fragmentation film, and chemical detectors. The police are also facing a serious shortage of emergency-response vehicles. The Fire Department has $277 million worth of “urgent needs.”

The FDNY still needs $120 million to replace the outdated communications structure that so hampered the response to 9/11. It needs $40 million to upgrade a data network for dispatching fire and EMS personnel because the current system can be shut down entirely by an attack on one small part of the system. The FDNY also needs money for a large fireboat in the event of an attack on a cruise ship, bridge, or port, as well as a new hazardous-material battalion that will cost $25 million. Without it, Bloomberg’s shopping list flatly states, “the City of New York is inadequately prepared for a major chemical and/or biological incident.”

AMs the city fights on one front to save its anti-terror dollars from being redirected to Podunk, America, on another front it is battling Republicans who have attacked one of the few federal funding formulas that actually do benefit New York. Every six years, Congress passes a mammoth transportation bill paid for with federal gasoline taxes assessed at the pump. When the money is returned to the states, it is spent not just on highways and bridges that benefit the car owners who pay the gas taxes, but on mass-transit projects used by people who may never buy gas. Every six years, this quirk in the formula pits gas-tax donor states like Texas against states like New York. Last year, Tom DeLay, from Sugarland, Texas, launched a crusade to mandate that every state get back at least 95 percent of its gas-tax dollars. The current so-called minimum guarantee is 91.5 percent. DeLay happens to be the majority leader of the House and the person whom Bloomberg’s lobbyists consider to be the most consistently anti–New York member of Congress. “He seems to be the one that always gets in the way,” says a Bloomberg aide. “And he’s powerful.” If DeLay wins this fight, it will cost the state $300 million a year, according to Bloomberg, with most of that money coming at the city’s expense.

One of the most important streams of federal money for New York City comes through the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It’s also one of the fattest annual targets of Bush’s budget ax. “Our housing money is under attack,” a Bloomberg aide says, sighing. One of every twelve New Yorkers relies on the New York City Housing Authority, making it the largest entity of its kind in America. It mostly serves the poor, the elderly, and the very young. Since Bush was inaugurated, the Housing Authority has seen a drop of $175 million in federal funding at the same time demand for its help has soared. Last year, the city lost $3.8 million in Community Development Block Grants, which are used for dozens of different projects to make New York more livable, from neighborhood preservation to the cleanup of vacant lots to providing health- and day-care services in housing projects.

In addition, in next year’s budget, Bush has proposed to cut so-called Section 8 vouchers, used by poor tenants to pay for housing, by $107 million. The Bloomberg administration argues, “A loss of this size will have serious repercussions for the City of New York.” Earlier this year, as New York’s delegation fought to restore some of this money, it was blindsided by a technical ruling from the Bush administration that would drastically scale back how much Washington would pay for Section 8 vouchers from last year’s budget. The change would mean that New York would face a shortfall of some $50 million.

Even Bush’s signature housing initiative, the American Dream Downpayment Act (ADDP), which would help first-time home buyers afford a house, actually hurts New York City. New Yorkers, and everyone else, already have access to such funds under an existing program called the Home Investment Partnership Program (HOME). Unfortunately for the city, the funding formula for Bush’s new program is much less favorable to New York than home. Bush and Republicans want to move money from HOME to ADDP, which means that the city, which already has one of the lowest home-ownership rates in America, would actually receive less money to address the problem. The White House considers ADDP one of Bush’s major domestic-policy achievements.

Another domestic program the Bush administration has been especially proud of is his education law. It too has inflicted financial pain on the city over the past few years. It’s no wonder that New York’s response to Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation is virtually identical to John Kerry’s. They both agree that Bush hasn’t delivered what he promised when the law was designed. Bush has consistently argued that education funding has rapidly increased on his watch, but Bloomberg undercuts this claim by noting that it hasn’t risen nearly enough to implement the sweeping reforms of Bush’s new law. Bloomberg wants billions more than Bush put in his budget this year. “Absent significant federal increases in the future,” the mayor’s office recently wrote, “effective implementation of new federal education reforms will be extremely difficult.”

Bloomberg’s budget team occasionally seems frustrated enough with Bush’s cuts that they sound like Democratic operatives. When explaining how Bush’s budget funds a program to educate disadvantaged children at only half of what the city is eligible to receive, the Bloomberg legislative agenda notes that “more than 200,000 low-income students are being left behind in New York City as a result of the federal shortfall.”