Five years have passed since Sept. 11, 2001, without another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Yet in a recent interview with the Orlando Sentinel, former U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham of Florida said flatly that Americans aren't safer.

President George W. Bush, not surprisingly, disagrees. But even he said this past week that "while America is safer, we are not yet safe."

Whether one shares the view of Mr. Graham or Mr. Bush, there is much more to be done to protect Americans. The onus lies not only on the president, but Congress.

The war on terrorism is an enormous and multifaceted undertaking. It includes fighting terrorists abroad, confronting their sponsors, upgrading intelligence, cooperating with other nations to interdict weapons and financing, and waging the battle of ideas around the world to undercut support for violent extremists.

Still, protecting Americans from terrorists starts with better homeland security. The federal government does not have unlimited funds for that goal, and the money available has been squeezed by the huge cost of the Iraq war. But politics also have hindered progress.

Despite urging from the 9-11 commission and other experts, Congress has refused to limit homeland-security grants to areas at high risk for terrorist attacks. It has guaranteed a piece of the pie to all states, reducing the dollars available for the most vulnerable ones. Even the grant program intended for high-risk cities is spread so thin that shares for Washington, D.C., and New York were cut some 40 percent in the latest round.

Congress has spent billions to harden aviation security. There's still plenty of room for improvement, however, in screening passengers and cargo for explosives.

And other areas vulnerable to terrorist attacks -- including chemical plants, rail traffic, ports, mass-transit systems and municipal water supplies -- have not received enough attention or funding. Congress could ease the federal burden in these areas by setting mandatory rather than voluntary security standards for the private companies involved.

Meanwhile, there are still serious gaps in U.S. border security, raising the risk that terrorists could be slipping through. Congress has stalled on some border-security improvements because it has refused to seek compromise on the related issues of dealing with illegal immigrants already in the country and meeting the economy's need for workers.

In his Sentinel interview, Mr. Graham gauged the probability of another "significant terrorist event" in the United States over the next decade at 100 percent. It shouldn't take another attack for Congress to take a more effective, less political approach to homeland security. The searing memory of 9-11 should be more than enough.