This is beginning to remind me of a panel I was involved with about 15
or so years ago when I was on an ad hoc White House Advisory Committee
which was discussing the broadcasting of television to Castro's Cuba.
I was a DOD tech rep and a careerist (I am now retired). We met in the
White House Situation Room, almost directly under the Oval Office.
Virtually all the other folks on this committee were lawyers and all
but me and two military (one was the Vice Chief of the Joint Staff)
were political appointees. This project went forward and is known as
TV Marti, despite warnings from the technical folks that it could be
easily jammed should the Cubans decide that they did not wish their
population to see it. (The Cuban Government did want their population
to see it and they did jam it). Although I did not have a political
role in this matter and I was not a decision maker, just an advisor,
what we had was a bunch of politicos trying to legislate the Laws of
Physics. The engineering folks put forth all the technical arguements
why this project could not meet its goals (that the Cuban average Joe
with a common TV set could see American propaganda at any time), but
to satisfy an interest group (the Miami Cuban exiles) the project was
done anyway. In my technical capacity I was asked how many weeks or
month it would take to jam this signal and I said 30 seconds. I erred,
the Cubans identified and jammed the signal in 29 seconds.

This summer, I was back in my hometown, a small town in the midwest (I
now live near Washington DC) and the ham club to which I belonged as a
kid was making improvements to their club station, located in a public
building, under the guise of Homeland Security Anti-Terrorism, and
funded in large part by that program. Now there are many reasons why
the public officials might want a back-up emergency comms systems in
this sparsely settled area, but I seriously doubt that terrorism was
one of them. More power to the club for having the initiative to try
to get these funds, but multiply this by every hamlet in the 3000+
counties in the US and you have what my history books called "pork."
This program in the hinterland is draining off funding for areas where
a terrorist incident is a very real threat, like here in Washington DC
where it did indeed happen, at a building in which I once worked for a
time.

W3JT