Posts Tagged ‘Congress/DOD’

The only way Congress authorizes a new BRAC round in 2015 is if President Obama threatens to veto any defense authorization bill that does not include it, several Capitol Hill staffers have told Foreign Policy magazine’s E-Ring blog. “Unless the White House is willing to put its own political capital on the line for a BRAC round, which they definitely did not do last year, we’ve probably heard the last of a BRAC round in this bill cycle,” a House Armed Services Committee staffer told the publication …

Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, last week was named one of nine winners of the 2013 Secretary of Defense Environmental Awards for its efforts to conserve energy and cut its greenhouse gas emissions. The 673rd Air Base Wing at JBER worked with local municipalities and utility providers to convert landfill gas into usable energy for a project estimated to generate more than 56,000 megawatt hours, or 26 percent, of the installation’s electrical load. The plant reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 13,944 tons of methane and is expected to save $73.6 million over the project’s lifecycle …

An infusion of funds for DOD’s operations account courtesy of the full-year fiscal 2013 defense spending bill Congress passed in March has granted the Hampton Roads, Va., region a reprieve from many of the overhaul and other ship maintenance projects the Navy earlier had suspended. But sequestration, which could slash the defense budget by almost $500 billion through FY 2021, is still lurking and defense contractors in the area remain anxious about the future, reports the Virginian-Pilot …

One argument lawmakers have made to counter the administration’s request to hold a new BRAC round is that the Defense Department first should review its overseas infrastructure before scrutinizing its domestic real estate. The Army already is in the midst of an effort to consolidate its European footprint, points out Katherine Hammack, assistant secretary for installations, energy and environment. The service is on pace to reduce its force structure in Europe by more than 45 percent by the end of 2016 …

New Mexico’s two Democrat senators and one Republican senator from Texas last week introduced legislation to transfer several large parcels of land between the Army and the Bureau of Land Management to provide buffers around White Sands Missile Range and Fort Bliss. The moves called for in the legislation were the result of an agreement reached between the Army and BLM …

DOD expects to incur more than $24 million in costs at two installations shuttered during the 2005 round of base closures to unwind renewable energy and privatized utility projects affected by the closures, according to a new Government Accountability Office study. At Fort Monmouth, N.J., the Army paid about $24.3 million to terminate a renewable energy contract involving ground source heat pumps and to install several boilers to replace the heat pumps. The Army also terminated a privatized electrical utility contract at Fort Monroe, Va., but has not yet reached a settlement with the utility over the termination …

Lawmakers offered several novel arguments against granting DOD’s request for a new BRAC round in 2015 while questioning top Pentagon officials during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week, but ultimately all the members of the panel who addressed the issue voiced reasons to oppose additional base closures. There’s got to be a better way to close installations than the BRAC process, which upsets communities as soon as a new round is authorized, said Sen. Tim Kaine. “When BRAC is announced, what happens is that every community that has military assets, whether they’re ultimately going to be on the chopping block or not, they lawyer-up, they accountant-up, they public relations-up …

Officials still are evaluating whether to furlough more than 700,000 civilian employees as a way to trim defense spending over the last half of the year, Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale said on Thursday. “Secretary Hagel has asked that we take another close look at furloughs, and we are in the process of doing that …

In a review of the impact of the growing number of privatization projects on military installations, the Government Accountability Office concluded that future base closure rounds would benefit from the Defense Department providing more comprehensive information about the potential costs created when DOD terminates project agreements with the private sector. The congressional watchdog agency found that the department likely would incur liabilities following a BRAC round for renewable energy and privatized utility projects on affected installations …

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 …