An Open Letter on BRAC

In a letter to congressional leaders last year, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work explained the consequences of failing to enact BRAC, both for local communities and for the military:

Under current fiscal restraints, local communities will experience economic impacts regardless of a congressional decision regarding BRAC authorization. This has the harmful and unintended consequence of forcing the Military Departments to consider cuts at all installations, without regard to military value. … Without BRAC, local communities' ability to plan and adapt to these changes is less robust and offers fewer protections than under BRAC law.

Tim Ford, CEO of the Association of Defense Communities, warns about the impact that this death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach is having. “The concern is that cuts are happening anyway on a smaller scale,” he said. “Downsizing is occurring, but in a piece meal manner.” Unsurprisingly, an overwhelming majority of the communities ADC represents would prefer a BRAC to the current alternative.

While base closures cost money up front, the data shows that savings begin to accrue almost immediately. In the first round of BRAC, the savings began in fiscal year (FY) 1990—the first year of implementation—at a meager $72 million and then rose steadily to $1.5 billion annually by FY 1995. The second round of BRAC was even more impressive, with savings beginning at $548 million in the first year of implementation, FY 1992, and rising to a peak of $3.4 billion in FY 1997. The third and fourth BRAC rounds in the late 1990s followed a similar pattern.

Today, the first four BRAC rounds together are producing annual recurring savings of around $7 billion. Even the much-criticized 2005 BRAC—which focused mostly on realignment of functions at existing facilities, and closed far fewer bases than in preceding rounds—is producing nearly $5 billion in annual savings.

Members of Congress who profess great concern about cutting waste, but who claim that an overseas BRAC must come first, are being disingenuous: the Pentagon retains the ability to close military facilities not on U.S. soil, and has done so, but Congress has blocked closures here at home for over a decade. In that time, the military has been forced to allocate resources away from the training and equipping of our soldiers, and toward maintaining unneeded and unwanted infrastructure. Local communities have been deprived of the support that BRAC would provide, and have been denied access to property that could be put to productive use. Meanwhile, many tens of billions of taxpayers’ dollars have been wasted.

BRAC has proven to be a fair and efficient process for making the difficult but necessary decisions related to the configuration of our military’s infrastructure. In the absence of a BRAC, defense communities are hurting. Although members of Congress have blocked base closures with the intent of helping these communities, they are actually making the problem worse. The time to act is now. Congress should grant our military the authority to eliminate waste, and ensure that vital defense resources flow to where they are most needed.