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For Immediate Release: February 26, 2004

Contact:

Harald Stavenas Angela Sowa (202) 225-2539 Sarah Shelden (Hefley) (202) 225-4422

Statement of Chairman Joel Hefley
Hearing on Resetting and Reconstituting the Force

Today, the Readiness Subcommittee meets to hear testimony from the Department of Defense and the Department of the Air Force on the fiscal year 2005 budget request for military construction and family housing. I welcome our witnesses, and look forward to their testimony.

Once again, the subcommittee has received a military construction and family housing budget request that falls far short of addressing the aging and failing facilities of our nation's military. This Congress - and every Congress before it for the last decade - has added funds to military construction and family housing budgets. This historic trend should clearly indicate to the Department that the annual budgets being sent to the Hill are inadequate for the task at hand.

Nevertheless, the FY 2005 military construction and family housing budget request is - once again - disappointing. Not only does it represent a real reduction to the FY 2004 program, but it is nearly $1.4 billion smaller than was forecast for FY 2005 by last year's budget.

This only serves to further undermine my confidence in the Future Years Defense Plan, which was supposed to include significant military construction budget increases for FY 2006 and beyond. Not only have similar "outyear" predictions been proven wrong countless times before, but I note that the forecasted amounts for military construction appear to have been cut by $6 billion from the amounts forecasted in the FY 2004 budget. Such decreases in long-term budget plans cannot support a commitment to meeting DOD's facilities needs - nor can the remaining budgets address Army transformation, increased Army force structure, the Global Posture Review, and other changes that will have significant effects on facilities requirements.

Last year, Mr. DuBois noted that the installation and environment portfolio includes more than just the military construction and family housing budget. He is correct - the complete picture includes sustainment, repair, modernization, and base operations budgets, as well as housing allowances and legislative efforts such as the Readiness and Range Preservation Initiative.

Unfortunately, the complete picture is also disappointing. Consider the following:

. the military construction budget is a real reduction from last year's program, and the FYDP is nearly 10 percent smaller than was forecast last year;

. two-thirds of the services' facilities are rated C-3 or C-4, an appalling state of readiness;

. visits to the field confirm that military facilities are continuing to deteriorate throughout services;

. the Department has implemented what appears to be a legitimate model for crafting sustainment budgets, yet it has no model for base operations, repair, and modernization budgets and continues to fund these accounts at levels that do not even support "must pay" bills; and

. the family housing program is based almost entirely upon a privatization program that will effectively cease to exist if Congress does provide legislative relief -- something it was unable to do last year due to budget constraints.

In sum, it strikes me that the Department is putting all of its facilities eggs in the BRAC basket - by which I mean that the Department has put its facilities program on hold until BRAC 2005, and is expecting that the billions of dollars in funding shortfalls that have accumulated over the past several decades will vanish when it closes excess bases. While the Department may eliminate a small fraction of its problems by disposing of some bases, a cursory examination of projected budgets indicates that they will fall far short of the amounts necessary build new facilities, repair and modernize old ones, and deal with the costs of base closures and environmental remediation.

In the end, the result will be the same - our nation's soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, and the families that support them, will be forced to live and work in inadequate facilities. So while I applaud the Department's efforts to improve bachelor and family housing, I must take this opportunity to urge our witnesses to redouble their efforts within the Department to increase facilities budgets and improve living and working conditions for our service members and their families.

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