Grand Forks Herald March 13, 2005
Base closing chief has experience
Principi closed three VA hospitals, downsized others
By Eric Rosenberg; Hearst Newspapers
Anthony Principi, the White House nominee to run the new military base-closing commission, is no stranger to shutting government facilities.
As President Bush's first secretary of veterans affairs, Principi, 60, set the gears in motion last May to close three veterans hospitals and downsize others before leaving the administration.
Like military bases, VA hospitals are major regional employers, and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are resistant to cost-cutting measures that affect their districts.
Now, as chairman of the nine-member base-closing commission, Principi the former aerospace executive, Vietnam veteran and current vice president of Pfizer Inc., the drug company will preside over the government equivalent of a full-mouth root canal minus the novocaine.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says there is as much as 25 percent excess capacity at the country's 425 military facilities, suggesting that perhaps nearly 100 are vulnerable to being closed outright or trimmed back. It will be Principi's job as chairman, a post Bush nominated him for earlier this month, to ensure that the Pentagon justifies its proposed cutbacks.
The White House plans to nominate the other eight members this week. All require Senate confirmation.
Closing bases or realigning them by transferring military units from one to another will allow the Pentagon to spend the savings "to improve the quality of life of men and women in uniform, force protection and investments in weapons systems," Rumfeld told a Senate panel last month.
Some critics contend that the defense chief exaggerates the amount of fat that could be cut.
John Pike, director of Global Security.org, a nonpartisan defense and security research organization, noted that the Army is boosting its rolls by 30,000 troops and will need U.S. facilities to house them, as well as to accommodate forces being transferred from Europe.
"When they talk about 25 percent excess, I just don't see it," Pike said.
Buttressing Rumsfeld's quest are findings from a January Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, which concluded that the four previous base closing rounds in 1988, 1991, 1993 and 1995 have saved the military $28.9 billion. GAO, the investigative branch of Congress, also concluded that the actions, which included the closings of 97 major facilities and hundreds of realignments or closures of smaller facilities, did not inflict severe hurt on regional economies.
Criteria
The Pentagon in January published the criteria for determining which facilities will be on the hit list. They include the military value of a facility, the condition of the land and buildings on a base and whether the airspace is suitable for training, the ability of a facility to accommodate so-called surge forces in time of crisis, the environmental impact of closing a facility and the economic impact on the local community.
Changes
There are two major changes in the design of the new commission. There is an additional member adding up to nine members instead of eight and a rule requiring that any commission action requires approval of at least seven members. The changes make it more difficult for the commission to tinker with the Pentagon's hit list.
If history is a guide, odds are fairly good that once a base is placed on the Pentagon list, the commission will keep it there.
Charles Smith, who served as executive director of the 1995 base closing commission, said that the commissions "generally don't do much changing. About 80 percent to 85 percent of the list is approved."
Candidates
House and Senate leaders have recommended six candidates for the commission, but President Bush has the final say in nominating the panel.
Among those names congressional leaders have put forward are retired Gen. John Coburn, former Army deputy chief of staff, retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman Jr., former supreme allied commander of the Atlantic; Philip Coyle, the Pentagon's former chief weapons tester, and former Rep. James Hansen, R-Utah, a critic of the 1995 base-closing round after President Clinton stepped in to help military facilities in San Antonio and Sacramento.
Hansen, whose state stood to lose jobs because of Clinton's actions, accused Clinton of trying to gain favor in vote-rich states.
What's to come
The VA hospital closures may provide clues about how Principi might manage the base-closing commission.
Principi prevailed in the VA cutbacks, in part because he is well regarded on both sides of the political divide and is sensitive to the needs of Congress. A congressional aide for 10 years earlier in his career, Principi originally had sought to close additional hospitals but scaled back his hit list on advice of an independent panel. In addition, the closures came with sweeteners of new hospital construction and expanded out-patient clinics for vets.
"If you're not going to work with Congress, you're going to fail," he told reporters last year, adding that "I worked very, very hard to ensure that Congress understood the reason, the rationale, why we're undertaking this."
© Copyright 2005, Grand Forks Herald
