Panel may seek to delay next round of base closings

The chairman of the House Armed Services Readiness Subcommittee is expected to support a bid to delay the Pentagon's 2005 round of military base closings when the panel meets Friday, House sources from both parties said Tuesday.

Subcommittee Chairman Joel Hefley, R-Colo., "would be receptive to a postponement" of a new round of closings, said a Republican aide who is aware of Hefley's thinking.

"He won't offer an amendment, but he would be open to it," the aide said. "He's concerned about the timing" of the closings, which would come on the heels of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and as tensions simmer in the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula.

Hefley will assess the committee's position at an informal meeting Thursday, one day before the panel marks up its portion of the fiscal 2004 defense authorization bill. At a similar meeting before the April recess, the Democratic and Republican sources said there was strong support to push back the Pentagon's request.

"I can't say it was 100 percent, but members were overwhelmingly in support of at least a postponement," the Democrat source said. Both sources said there is no evidence to suggest a shift in sentiment since that meeting.

While the Republican source said Hefley will not offer an amendment or include the base-closing postponement in the chairman's mark, at least one Democrat on the subcommittee, Rep. Gene Taylor of Mississippi, has drafted several possible riders, including one that would cancel the base-closing round entirely and another that would delay any action by the Base Realignment and Closure Commission.

"He intends to derail the BRAC process," the Democratic source said. "Obviously, he would prefer a repeal, but if there were a compromise for delaying the process, that would be OK."

Pentagon spokesman Glenn Flood said he does not expect the subcommittee's action to have much impact on the process.

"There's always going to be some members in Congress who will be against closing any bases," he said. "It might be a big deal to them [subcommittee members], but to us it's the first step in a long haul."

After the full committee votes and both the House and Senate consider the plan, he added, "I don't think Congress will backtrack on this."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has tied the 2005 round of closings to his plan to transform the military into a smaller, more flexible force. The Pentagon's spending blueprint for 2004 called for spending $20 billion to close or revamp about one of every four bases and estimated the move would save the government about $6.5 billion a year.

The new round of base closings-the fifth overall, but the first since 1995-was called for in the hotly debated fiscal 2002 defense authorization measure. The House at the time opposed any base closings while the Senate voted 53-47 for a round of closings in 2003.

As a compromise, a conference report settled on the 2005 round. The legislation requires Rumsfeld to develop criteria for selecting bases to close by the end of this year to submit a proposed list of closings and realignments to the nine-member commission by May 16, 2005. The commission would have until Sept. 8, 2005, to add or subtract sites from the list. Congress and President Bush would have to accept or reject the list in its entirety.

For the 2005 round, Rumsfeld is required to link recommendations to anticipated 2006 troop levels and spending estimates. The Republican source said Hefley is unhappy with the process and wants to change it, but is not necessarily opposed to eventually closing bases that are no longer needed.

The Democratic source said Taylor will not support any closings "unless the administration can make a compelling case. Once you lose a facility, you can't get it back."