By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

It’s long been a mantra of conservatives that government “just throws money at problems.” (Of course, liberals say this, too, when the issue is Defense Department spending.)

But nowhere should critics on the left and right unite more quickly than on homeland security spending, and particularly the billions being thrown at germ war research labs — with insufficient attention to security.

The pathetic case of Dr. Bruce E. Ivins demonstrates that a determined sociopath — or terrorist — can breach even the most stringent precautions. The lab at Fort Detrick, Md., where Ivins worked, included “random inspections by an ‘elite roving observer force,’ then constant video surveillance,” according to The Washington Post’s Nelson Hernandez and Philip Rucker.

But the lab’s personnel reliability program, which required “co-workers . . . to report abnormal behavior or risk losing their security clearances,” obviously didn’t work in Ivins’ case.

Since 9/11, though, the construction of bio-labs has exploded, with even fewer security measures, according to Richard Ebright, an eminent molecular biologist at Rutgers University, “than at your local McDonald’s or your local convenience store.”

Now we’re told.

Congress appropriated so much money for biodefense, “it could not be expended through the normal process,” says Ebright. “The only way to spend it was through large-cost capital construction.”

It was “budgeting and planning driven by appropriations, rather than by needs,” Ebright said, “the epitome of pork-barrel spending.”

And the largesse has been spread far and wide.

“Instead of concentrating this expanded research effort in a few highly secure facilities and staffing them with scientists with experience handling dangerous pathogens, the Bush administration and Congress decided to disperse the spending nationwide by building a host of new high-containment labs around the country,” says Jonathan B. Tucker, a leading specialist in chemical and biological weapons.

But who knows what’s going on in them?

As Tucker points out, the Government Accountability Office reported last fall that “no single federal agency is responsible for tracking the number and location of high- and maximum-containment labs in the United States, or for determining the safety and security risks associated with the spread of such labs.”

At the new labs, says Richard Besser, a CDC director familiar with the select agent security assessments, the background checks for lab scientists are not as stringent as screenings for other federal agencies.