Both leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee are considering another round of base realignment and closure, something the Pentagon has been requesting for years.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and chairman of the committee, said on Tuesday that he and ranking member Sen. Jack Reed will talk with Defense Secretary James Mattis about closing excess infrastructure in the Defense Department. Some estimates have suggested the Pentagon has about 20 percent excess capacity.
“Sen. Reed and I are seriously considering the issue of BRAC and obviously we want to talk to the now-secretary of defense about it, but it’s a little bit like sequestration. We can’t make the decisions ourselves, so we leave it up a commission, and frankly the last commission made some very bad decisions,” McCain said. “We need to talk about it, I think it has to be considered as all things should be on the table.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said he’s heard from members of the military who are less concerned with how much money they have to spend and more concerned with how they can spend the money they have. He said Congress must recognize it is impeding the Defense Department’s progress by not allowing the services to have more flexibility.
The Pentagon has repeatedly asked Congress to be able to close excess infrastructure, especially when budgets are already tight, but Congress has not allowed it. The issue of a base realignment and closure has been unpopular among lawmakers who don’t want to close a base and lose jobs in his or her district.
Rep. Mac Thornberry, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, last year suggested that he would be open to discussing another round of base closures if Pentagon officials could provide up-to-date data on how much infrastructure it needs to close, instead of relying on numbers that are more than a decade old.
“My point is, we don’t have any extra money laying around,” Thornberry said in early 2016 at the National Press Club. “We better be darn careful we know that we have something that we don’t need because once we give it away, especially if it’s a training range or flying range or something, we’ll never get it back.”
The fiscal year 2017 budget request asked for $4 million to begin planning for a new round of base closures in 2019, which did not make it into the final budget.
The last round of base realignment and closure in 2005 faced much criticism, and some lawmakers argued that it did not yield savings as fast as expected. But Pentagon officials in March said that the Defense Department wasn’t happy with how the last effort went either, and promised to do better if given another chance.
“We think a future BRAC round would have a much different financial ramification,” Jamie Morin, director for cost assessment and program evaluation, said during an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We just need to move forward on this to enable a whole bunch of cost take-out, to drive more combat capability out of each taxpayer dollar.”
