We taxpayers have ponied up about $1.4 billion for so-called “fusion centers” that were designed to coordinate information on threats and plots to the homeland. Here’s the result:
Federally funded centers created to improve terrorism-related information-sharing with state and local governments often produce “irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence reporting,” congressional investigators concluded in a review released Tuesday.
Most fusion center reporting didn’t involve terrorists or potential plots, but instead focused on arrest information related to drug, cash or human smuggling, according to the review by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs investigations subcommittee.
