BRAC and Jobs at Risk

Press Release

BRAC and Jobs at Risk

As a member of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process was one of my primary focuses from 2003-2005. When the final BRAC Recommendations Report was released in August 2005, Wright Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB) was one of the big winners. The community worked together to demonstrate how valuable of an asset WPAFB is to our military. We showed that the research being done at Wright-Patt today will provide the United States with its advantages on the battlefields of tomorrow. When the BRAC commission's work was done, over 3,000 jobs had been preserved and approximately 1,000 additional jobs were slated to be moved to WPAFB.

However, from the moment the BRAC recommendations were announced I warned that we had to continue to work diligently to ensure that the jobs slated to come to WPAFB actually came to our region. We knew that interests in the communities where the jobs were scheduled to move from would work hard to preserve those jobs for their region. One of factors that could prevent the jobs from coming to Wright-Patt would be failure to obtain the federal military construction funds necessary to do infrastructure construction improvements projects to house aerospace medicine research, and other military research programs scheduled to be relocated to WPAFB by 2011. According to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, without sufficient funding it would be impossible for the Department of Defense (DoD) to meet legal guidelines for accomplishing the BRAC mandate.

The president's budget requested $5.6 billion to implement the 2005 recommendations of the BRAC Commission. Congress accepted the report and last year, as a member of the House Armed Service Committee, I was pleased to begin authorizing the funds that would allow the BRAC recommendations to be implemented. However, a final budget was not agreed to by the House and Senate before the 109th Congress adjourned. Therefore, all government operations for this fiscal year needed to be revisited and completed.

Nancy Pelosi and the new majority lived up to some of our worst concerns and have now cut $3.1 billion, more than half, of the president's requested budget to implement the BRAC recommendations. This dramatically increases the risk that DoD will not be able to meet its statutory deadline to implement the BRAC Commission recommendations by fiscal year 2011. This fact jeopardizes the jobs slated to come to our region. In addition to WPAFB, many other communities throughout the country have begun making specific plans to prepare for BRAC. The substantial funding cuts to implement the BRAC recommendations also risks the plans that these other communities have spent years working on as well. It also increases the risk that nationally, the BRAC savings will be reduced, and raises the chances of delaying or postponing scheduled redeployments of military personnel and their families from overseas stations to the United States.

The $3.1 billion cut from funding implementation of the BRAC recommendations specifically leaves doubt whether WPAFB will receive the $19 million it has been counting on this year for infrastructure work to prepare for an ambitious construction effort scheduled to begin in 2008. Further, the approximately $250 million additional construction at WPAFB could be delayed. The construction was scheduled to have everything ready to relocate the programs being consolidated at WPAFB - and the new jobs within five years. Failure to receive that funding on schedule risks successfully relocating the programs to the region and receiving the new jobs we hoped we'd won in August 2005.

Defense Secretary Gates has been meeting with Senate leaders of both parties to discuss the consequences of failure to follow through on funding the BRAC. I am working with other members of HASC to convince the Senate of the importance of enacting the BRAC Commission recommendations.

Fully funding the president's request to start military base realignment and closure - especially as it impacts WPAFB and the jobs it will bring to our region - is one of my top priorities.

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