Senator Schumer, a longtime critic of the federal Homeland Security Department’s formula for funding terrorism prevention, renewed his threat to flex the Democrats’ new congressional muscle by pushing through legislation to force the Bush administration to allocate resources based solely on how likely a locality is to be targeted by terrorists.

Mr. Schumer’s legislation would effectively dismantle a so-called peer-review panel, made up of police, fire, and emergency managers who volunteer from across America which scrutinizes proposed terrorist-prevention projects and recommends where and how many federal dollars should be allocated.

“So a police chief in Salina, Kansas, might determine what New York’s terrorist needs are,” Senator Schumer said yesterday.

The recommendations aren’t binding, but homeland security officials usually follow them. The secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, announced last week he had allotted almost $747 million to be split among six high-risk metropolitan areas, with New York and parts of New Jersey as one of these six.

A homeland security spokesman in Washington, Jarrod Agen, defended peer review as an important tool for scrutinizing proposed projects and monitoring government spending.

“The process is in place so that someone is overseeing how these funds are going to be used,” Mr. Agen said yesterday. “It doesn’t do justice to taxpayers if we just blankly give out the funds without some idea of how the funds will be used.”

Some lawmakers have long criticized how homeland security money is allotted — and there was much outcry when federal officials cut funds to New York by almost 40%. Mr. Schumer and other Democrats in the House are vowing to use their newly won power to force change on homeland security.

“I had a happy 2006,” Mr. Schumer said, referring to the Election Day victory he helped engineer. “God was good to me that year.”