This is just New York bureucratic types trying to justify their continued existence as PSA writers during a financially trying time.

In the larger frame of the US political process, anything that distracts people from the issue of the economy will be floated as the current administration will lose miserably if voters are focused on that issue. If an existential crisis can be manufactured to convince voters that the economy and their own material conditions are of lesser concern than the immediate threat of total thermonuclear annihilation, then that narrative will be used, much as it was during the 1950's, and again in the 1980's, and in a slightly different vein, replaced with the threat of terrorism following the 2000 elections.