Posts Tagged ‘Congress/DOD’

While senior officials for the Navy and Marine Corps acknowledged at a hearing Tuesday of the House Armed Services Committee that they don’t expect to eliminate much infrastructure if a BRAC round is launched in 2015, for the most part they did not go along with the ranking member’s ploy to convince his colleagues to authorize more base closures. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) asked the witnesses if it would be accurate to characterize their needs in a future BRAC as making changes around the edges versus “closing huge, major bases in the middle …

Pentagon spending to support a permanent military presence in Germany, South Korea and Japan is subject to little oversight and rising faster than anticipated, according to a report released Wednesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee. Nearly 70 percent of the $10 billion DOD spends on overseas installations goes to facilities in those three countries. The committee’s review looked at how the burden of costs is shared between the United States and its allies, the impact of planned posture changes on those costs, and the spending and oversight of foreign governments’ in-kind payments used for military construction projects …

Lawmakers on Wednesday pressed Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to explain why the department’s $527 billion base budget request for fiscal 2014 ignores sequestration and is $52 billion above the spending cap set by the 2011 Budget Control Act. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said what was “most troubling” about the budget was that it did “not even acknowledge the mandatory cuts associated with sequestration in fiscal year ’14, much less propose a plan to replace the cuts that can actually pass Congress …

As the budget season gets under way, Democrats and Republicans will need to find a compromise over sequestration before appropriators can craft fiscal 2014 spending measures. As the law currently stands, automatic cuts will result in government-wide discretionary spending falling from about $984 billion in the current year to $967 billion in FY 2014. That’s the figure House appropriators favor …

The top officials for the Navy and Marine Corps told lawmakers Tuesday that they do not expect to cut much spare capacity if a new base closure round goes ahead in 2015. “We in the Navy have taken previous BRAC rounds very seriously,” Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told the House Armed Services Committee. “We’ve shed most of our duplicative and overlapping bases and services …

The chairman and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee said they oppose the Pentagon’s request to conduct a round of base closures in 2015, a stance which presents a formidable barrier to the Pentagon’s pursuit of a new BRAC round. Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin last week said he would not support DOD’s request, continuing his opposition from last year. On Tuesday, though, Levin added that he didn’t believe DOD was serious about its request because it failed to include any funds in next year’s budget to carry out a BRAC round …

The Obama administration’s decision to deliver a fiscal 2014 budget request that ignores the $52 billion sequester cut slated to be imposed on defense spending next year leaves it uncertain how the department’s new budget will be determined. The best case scenario is that Congress and the White House reach a long-term deficit reduction agreement — perhaps as part of the negotiations needed to lift the nation’s debt ceiling before the end of the summer — that replaces the automatic spending cuts …

Defense officials are considering cutting the number of unpaid furlough days civilian employees will be forced to take to as few as seven, after cutting the number of unpaid days to 14 last month. No decision has been made yet, and it is possible the Pentagon could drop the furloughs entirely …

Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, said at a hearing Friday that he is a “strong supporter” of another round of BRAC, making him the rare lawmaker who has publicly backed the Pentagon’s request to hold a new round in 2015. DOD needs to pare down its infrastructure following a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan and to adjust to a drop in defense spending, Smith said during a committee hearing on the Air Force’s fiscal 2014 budget request …

At a House hearing Friday primarily focused on the Pentagon’s request to hold a round of base closures in 2015, lawmakers were not particularly vociferous in their opposition to BRAC, but the DOD witnesses still found themselves needing to convince a skeptical appropriations subcommittee about the rationale for a new round. In characterizing the extent to which the military has spare capacity at its installations, Katherine Hammack, assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy and environment, painted the most vivid portrait when she described her service’s reliance on attrition to trim its end strength by 80,000 soldiers by 2017 …