Why Not Use the Base-Closing Model Elsewhere?

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JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL

In Praise of Buck-Passing

The base-closing panel lets Congress escape blame for tough choices. Why not follow the model elsewhere?

Monday, May 16, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced on Friday his recommendation to close 33 major domestic military bases, members of Congress predictably rushed to microphones to complain about the "unfairness" of cutbacks in their states and districts. But in private many grudgingly agree that the military base-closing process initiated in the 1980s is a success story because it makes necessary changes that Congress institutionally isn't capable of doing on its own. Far from criticizing the process, we should apply its lessons to other government programs.

The list of bases will now be reviewed by an independent panel headed by former Anthony Principi, a former secretary of veterans affairs. That panel will make changes of its own before sending a final list to President Bush by September. If Mr. Bush approves the closures, they would take place unless Congress rejects the list in its entirety The Government Accountability Office reports that previous rounds of base closings have so far resulted in $29 billion in savings, with further projected savings of $7 billion a year.

The base closing process grew out of a 1988 bill by then-Rep. Dick Armey of Texas, an economist who was in his second term in the House. Mr. Armey, who went on to serve eight years as majority leader, knew from his study of the incentives facing politicians that they are often incapable of cutting spending, no matter how obsolete, redundant or wasteful.

To break that logjam, he won approval for a commission that would operate largely outside of politics and ensure that valuable defense dollars would go only to bases that had real military value. It worked. By changing the political incentives so that they operated against higher spending, the process prompted Congress to approve the first base closings in a dozen years. Since then the shuttered facilities have included San Francisco's posh Presidio barracks, Utah's Fort Douglas, which had been established in 1862 to guard stagecoaches from Indian attacks, and the U.S. Naval Academy's dairy farm, which even the Navy had been trying to close down for over 30 years.

James Courter, a former New Jersey congressman who chaired a 1993 base-closing commission, told me that he heard every dire prediction imaginable that communities that lost their bases would die. "In fact, those places that planned ahead, aggressively sought out alternatives and improved their economic incentives often came out ahead of where they were," he says.

I can attest to one of those success stories. In the 1980s, my hometown of Sacramento, Calif., had two Air Force bases and an Army depot that employed some 18,000--among them my father, a civilian engineer for the Air Force. The government employed one of every three workers in the vicinity of Sacramento, which is also the state capital.

Successive base-closing commissions pretty much ended the U.S. military's presence in Sacramento by shutting all three bases. But predictions of economic disaster proved to be overblown. Mather Air Force Base has become a cargo airport, with a big presence from Federal Express. The Sacramento Army Depot has become a warehousing and office center. McClellan Air Force Base is a business park with tenants ranging from defense contractor Northrup Grumman to medical research and biotechnology firms. Some 75% of the lost jobs at the three facilities have been replaced, and local officials project that McClellan alone could employ 35,000 workers when conversion of the base is finished.

"I'd equate it to something like a personal tragedy where, in the end, you come out stronger," Paul Hahn, Sacramento's director of economic development, told the Sacramento Bee. "It's painful. But at the end of the day, we are more diverse with a bigger tax base." Indeed, government now accounts for only 22% of all the jobs in the Sacramento area.

Keith Caudle, a former Air Force colonel who was serving as McClellan's commander when it closed for good in 2001, credits his base's success story to forward-looking decisions to transfer the entire base to the county in one piece for nothing. The results can be so positive, he says, that "some communities ought to be out there begging the military to close their bases."

Other facilities have also turned budgetary lemons into lemonade. Austin, Texas, used the land vacated by Bergstrom Air Force Base to build a new state-of-the art commercial airport. Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth, N.H., near where the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard is now scheduled to be closed, is the site of a Red Hook Ale brewery. Even bases in remote rural areas are making progress. The site of Loring Air Force Base in Maine now boasts the state's largest industrial park, a magnet school and a wildlife refuge.

Of course, not all bases have such happy endings. El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County, Calif., fell prey to opposition from locals who didn't want it converted to a commercial airport. Three separate referendums have held up any progress on reclaiming the site for private economic activity. Yet such cases are the exception.

Given how well the base-closing process has worked out, you'd think Congress would be interested in finding ways to emulate it. After all, commissions can transfer the political heat from unpopular political decisions by delegating legislative power to independent panels over which Congress would still have the final say. Indeed, Congress has already ceded much of its regulatory powers to independent federal bodies such as the Environmental Protection Agency. Why not help unwind that trend by using that same approach to scale back unneeded programs and regulations? Instead, the successful effort seems to have frightened Congress into blindly rejecting similar processes to reform entitlements, eliminate agricultural extension offices and end corporate welfare.

Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, says Congress's willingness to delegate power is inversely proportional to the breadth of responsibility that any outside panel would hold. He says the base closing model becomes less appealing to Congress the more the issue at stake isn't a narrow, well-defined one around which a consensus on the goals has formed.

Yet the unchecked growth of entitlement programs and Congress's own inability to rein in federal regulators may create conditions in which it again turns to unelected entities to shoulder the responsibility for tough decisions.

The Bush administration, for one, is hoping Congress will at least create the conditions for making more tough decisions such as base closings in the future. In its latest budget, it has proposed a pair of commissions that would be assigned to evaluate government programs for effectiveness and efficiency. An eight-member, bipartisan "Sunset Commission" would review every one of the federal government's 1,200 programs to see if they should be retained, restructured or terminated. Congress would establish a timetable for the reviews, and any program recommended for elimination by the panel would automatically sunset unless Congress took action to continue it.

A related "Results Commission," made up of experts in the relevant fields, would be convened on any specific issue deemed worthy of study and given nine months to come up with proposals to restructure federal programs related to it. If a president approved the recommendations, he would then submit them to Congress. The proposals would then be evaluated by Congress using expedited "fast track" procedures.

The two proposed commissions might make sense as a way of clearing away federal deadwood--after all, when was the last time any federal program actually closed its doors? But the opposition will be fierce. "Congress would relinquish its constitutional power to legislate," Rep. Henry Waxman, ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, told National Journal. "The proposal would be a field day for corporate lobbyists and put our most important health and safety programs in jeopardy."

Such hysteria is way overblown. A total of 24 states have enacted sunset laws of varying strength to end redundancies in programs and phase out archaic agencies. Texas periodically reviews every state agency and asks each to justify its continued existence to the taxpayers. The results have been modest but measurable. But if opponents of sunset commissions are so frightened by what the results of such a review might be at the federal level, I suggest a compromise: Only those agencies that are not specifically mandated in the Constitution would be subject to review. That would still leave an awful lot of government available for pruning or uprooting.

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