A BRAC for Everything

When released in 2005, the recommendations of the Pentagon's Base Realignment and Closing Commission made a lot of people unhappy. But that didn't halt the emergence of the term "BRAC-like" among advocates of various recent proposals for reorganizing government.

Last winter, both the Office of Management and Budget and Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., offered proposals for a new BRAC-like body to tap private-sector expertise for selling off excess federal properties. In November the Energy Department's inspector general proposed a BRAC-like body to "to rationalize DOE's research and development laboratories."

On Thursday, the Center for American Progress, a think tank with the ear of the Obama administration, packaged a set of papers on how to reorganize the government's business, trade and science functions to maximize economic growth and job creation. In familiar language, it called upon the "administration and Congress to create a bipartisan commission to consider and then implement these kinds of reforms to our federal science and economic competitiveness programs. The new commission, modeled after the so-called Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission that enabled the Department of Defense to restructure our military bases so effectively, would be able to overcome congressional and executive branch inertia to retool our innovation engine for competitiveness in the 21st century."