To listen to the Federal Newscast on your phone or mobile device, subscribe in PodcastOne or Apple Podcasts. The best listening experience on desktop can be found using Chrome, Firefox or Safari.

• Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is reminding servicemembers and DoD employees about the ethical values of the department. In a two-page memorandum published Tuesday, Austin laid out his expectations for members of the Defense community. They included the completion of annual ethics training by the end of November and assessing the Pentagon’s work processes to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse.

• Agencies will find little good news from the Government Accountability Office’s biennial high-risk list. GAO added two new broad topics to the list this year: The Small Business Administration’s emergency loan program, and national efforts to prevent, respond and recover from drug misuse. The Defense Department managed its scale back its infrastructure and facility program, however, and GAO removed DoD’s real estate footprint from the list this year. Five federal programs regressed since 2019, including federal human capital management. GAO said human capital and skills gaps challenges in the federal workforce are the root cause behind 22 items on the high-risk list. (Federal News Network)

• Though the Pentagon’s shortcomings still make up a healthy share of GAO’s high risk list, at least the list is getting at least a little shorter. For almost a quarter century, DoD’s management of its more than $1 trillion worth of real estate and facilities has been on the high risk list. GAO finally took it off in this year’s update. The government’s chief watchdog said the Pentagon has shown clear progress in identifying and tracking its real estate holdings, getting rid of unused space, and cutting support costs. DoD is still responsible for several other areas on the latest high risk list – most of them having to do with financial and program management. (Federal News Network)

• The Office of Personnel Management has its annual to-do list for federal health insurance providers. Mental health, surprise billing and the COVID-19 pandemic are all priorities for OPM in 2022. The agency is starting to negotiate benefits and rates for its carriers in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. OPM is asking insurance companies to start making preliminary preparations to cut back on surprise billing. OPM also said the pandemic is accelerating the need for insurance companies to cover more mental health services.

• Industry is getting its first look at a new governmentwide multiple award contract for services. The General Services Administration released a request for information offering its initial thinking around the BIC-MAC. This is the first step of a two-year process to replace the popular OASIS governmentwide professional services contract. GSA plans to hold an industry day in April and then release a second RFI in May. The draft solicitation is expected in the fall. Responses to the initial RFI are due March 17.

• The Office of Management and Budget said it’s time to return to the status quo on diversity and inclusion training. OMB has new guidance for agencies, now that former President Donald Trump’s order banning certain kinds of diversity and inclusion training is repealed. OMB said agencies should tell contractors they won’t be investigated, debarred or punished for hosting certain kinds of diversity and inclusion training. And agencies should delete any contract language to that effect. The Labor Department will also stop enforcing contractor compliance with the Trump order.

• The military academies are plagued with problems in the student body. School leaders are now presenting plans to address the issues. Sexual assault, cheating scandals and suicides all rocked the military academies in 2020. That’s not to mention moving classes online for a while due to COVID-19. The school superintendents said they are reinforcing honor codes, having sit-downs with students and changing their approach to discipline. The question is whether it will work and how quickly. The Naval Academy is also fighting against climate change as the school is fending off frequent high tide floods. The superintendent said the school is looking into building levees or seawalls to mitigate the floods. (Federal News Network)

• The Air Force is adding new attributes for airmen to describe themselves, or to aspire to, after taking a career development self-assessment test. The test is part of the MyVector program, which gives airmen resources to enhance their professional life, and may pair them with a mentor. “Digital literacy” and “fosters inclusion” are the newest attributes the program will use to describe some airmen. Digital literacy refers to using technology critically. Fostering inclusion means creating a culture where people are free to make their fullest contributions.

• How could anyone forget the great pandemic of 2020 and 2021? Well, the Library of Congress wants to make sure no one will. The Library said that several of its divisions have put together materials that document the pandemic, now approaching the one-year mark in the United States. The archive includes photographs of, and artwork inspired by, COVID-19 and the conditions it caused, as well as geospatial data and maps showing the reach of the virus, and maps of its mutations. The Library’s Copyright Office pulled out some of the many COVID-related application’s its received.

• Health agency CIOs see no going back from pandemic transformations. Department of Health and Human Resources CIO Perryn Ashmore said remote work was a relatively easy lift for HHS. But the pandemic transformed his job into being a part of emergency response. His office of 300 employees now tracks the status of 800,000 hospital beds across the country, as well as the supply of personal protective equipment to front-line workers. It’s also broken down some data-sharing barriers with other agencies. “Now that we’ve done it and we know how to do it, we’ll continue this work,” Ashmore said. (Federal News Network)

• The Justice Department is making Freedom of Information Act processing data from agencies more accessible to the public. DOJ’s Office of Information Policy is updating FOIA.gov with an agency-by-agency look at who gets the most FOIA requests, and how quickly those requests are processed. This information on the website is pulled from annual FOIA reports agencies submitted to the attorney general. OIP said it’s received fiscal year 2020 FOIA reports from nearly 120 agencies.

• A familiar face is taking over a major Department of Homeland Security component as its chief information officer. Sonny Bhagowalia is the permanent CIO at the Customs and Border Protection directorate at DHS, Federal News Network has confirmed, since mid-February. He had been acting CIO since June when Phil Landfried left after almost three years. This is Bhagowalia’s fifth time he’s risen to be CIO in the federal and state sectors. He’s been the lead technology executive at Treasury, Interior and for the state of Hawaii. Bhagowalia came to CBP in 2018 where he has overseen network and bandwidth improvements that lets CBP employees securely connect devices and obtain data through the cloud. (Federal News Network)

The Defense Department’s management of public resources is still an awful long way from perfection, but on Tuesday, DoD managed to do something it’s only pulled off twice before: Getting itself removed from a specific area of the Government Accountability Office’s High Risk List.

In releasing its latest version of the list, updated every two years with each new Congress, GAO determined the Pentagon has made enough progress on the topic of real property management that it’s no longer one of the most critical areas of concern from a governmentwide oversight perspective.

The department’s $1.3 trillion in real estate and facilities had been deemed a high risk area by GAO since 1997, largely because DoD had done a poor job of holding its base support costs in check, identifying unused facilities, and accounting for the the 26 million acres of real property it owns. Even now, the department’s databases can’t completely account for all of its real estate holdings with as much precision as they should, according to GAO.

But the department has shown enough progress that the issue is no longer a top concern for the watchdog. For example, last year, DoD mandated that the military services adopt a departmentwide web-based platform to report and track its real estate data. And even though Congress hasn’t approved a round of Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) since 2005, the department has shown it’s at least capable of using the BRAC process to rationalize its facility footprint, GAO concluded.

In another example the watchdog saw as promising, the Defense Department has led the way in the Office of Management and Budget’s “Freeze the Footprint” initiative to cut back on expensive and unnecessary facility holdings. The Army, for instance, reduced its leased space in the Washington, D.C. area — some of the most expensive leases in the country — from nearly 4 million square feet to just 1 million over the past decade.

And on military bases, the department has done a much better job of using intergovernmental support agreements with cities and counties for services like trash and snow removal and animal control, according to the new high-risk update.

Gene Dodaro, the U.S. Comptroller General, said the reforms DoD has made to real property management in recent years were due, at least in part, to stronger Congressional oversight.

“Congress required regular hearings where they had DoD come up and they had GAO continue to investigate this, and Congress stayed on them with requirements in the National Defense Authorization Act until it was improved. In some cases, there have been funds withheld for modernization efforts until they developed proper plans,” he told the House Oversight and Reform Committee Tuesday.

Across the federal government, there are still 19 high risk areas, and DoD’s “Support Infrastructure Management” category was the only one removed from the list this year. And the Pentagon is still solely responsible for numerous areas on GAO’s list.

Among them:

• DoD Weapon Systems Acquisition
• DoD Financial Management
• DoD Business Systems Modernization
• DoD Approach to Business Transformation
• DoD Contract Management

Previously, DoD has been able to get itself removed from the list in two other areas.

In the 2019 update, the watchdog removed the DoD supply chain management area from the list. That category had been there since the list’s first publication in 1990, but GAO determined the department had shown enough progress in ensuring supplies were delivered to the right place at the right time.

And in 2011, GAO took DoD’s personnel security clearance program off the list after the department demonstrated process improvements that reduced what had been a severe backlog in the security clearance process.

Since then, however, responsibility for security clearance background investigations has ping-ponged from DoD to the Office of Personnel Management’s now-defunct National Background Investigation Bureau, and back to DoD again.

And security clearances are back on the list. GAO reinstated the area to its list of top governmentwide concerns in January 2018, when the backlog had grown again to about 700,000 cases. As of yesterday’s update, GAO said there was still a backlog of 200,000 cases by the end of 2020.

We attempt to meet that essential requirement with civil service pay and job classification processes driven by a law that is 72 years old and a hiring process that limits the government’s ability to compete for talent. For a deep dive on the government’s human capital challenges, check out the National Academy of Public Administration study “No Time to Wait.”

Even with such immense challenges and a clear need for reform, civil service issues are not immune to our toxic political climate. There are clear partisan battle lines on civil service issues that make significant changes difficult.

It is not just the parties who fight over civil service issues. Other constituencies have their own interests. I participated in a roundtable discussion in 2019 where virtually everyone in the room had an issue they considered sacrosanct. They mostly agreed civil service modernization is necessary, as long as their issue was untouched. Unions wanted to protect collective bargaining and the institutional rights of the unions themselves. Veteran Service Organizations (VSOs) wanted to protect veterans preference as it is handled today. Conservative think tanks wanted fewer federal workers, with lower pay, less generous benefits, and less job security. Individual agencies wanted flexibility for themselves, even if it makes things more difficult for other agencies. Whether you agree or disagree with those interests, the idea that various groups have issues that they want off the table before they discuss civil service reform is the primary barrier to modernization.

So how do we make civil service modernization happen? It is unlikely everyone is going to walk away from protecting their own interests. It is even more unlikely that Congress will ignore their constituents and the interest groups that weigh in on civil service issues. Does that mean civil service reforms will be doomed? That we will have to be satisfied with tinkering around the edges? Or that Democrats should just ignore the Republicans and pass civil service modernization on their own? The answer to all those questions is no.

A partisan bill would not contribute to restoring confidence in government and trust in the civil service. It would be likely to be replaced with equally partisan changes the next time Republicans are in power. It is also unlikely that a one-sided civil service bill could be passed in the Senate due to the filibuster.

We need some mechanism for allowing a policy discussion to occur outside the walls of the Capitol. There is a model that might work, and that is the one created by the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process. BRAC was designed because the Defense Department needed a means of shedding excess infrastructure, but it was apparent that no sane member of Congress wanted to go on record voting to close bases where their constituents work. There was also a recognition that DoD’s infrastructure was too big and too costly. In order to reduce the political problems, Congress passed the Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990. This act, amended in 2005, created a presidentially-appointed BRAC Commission to review and make recommendations for closures and realignments. The Congressional Research Service described the BRAC process this way:

“Congress has defined BRAC selection criteria in statute, thus requiring the Secretary to prioritize military value over cost savings. Additionally, Congress has required the Secretary to align the Department’s recommendations with a comprehensive 20-year force structure plan. The commission may modify, reject, or add recommendations during its review before forwarding a final list to the President.

“After receiving the Commission’s list of recommendations, the President may either accept the report in its entirety or seek to modify it by indicating disapproval and returning it to the commission for further evaluation. If the President accepts the commission’s recommendations, they are forwarded to Congress. BRAC implementation begins by default unless Congress rejects the recommendations in their entirety within 45 days by enacting a joint resolution. During the implementation phase, DOD is required to initiate closures and realignments within two years and complete all actions within six years.

“The BRAC process represents a legislative compromise between the executive and legislative branches wherein each shares power in managing the closure and realignment of military bases. The imposition of an independent, third-party mediator was intended to insulate base closings from political considerations by both branches that had complicated similar actions in the past.”

I believe a process modeled on the BRAC process is the best approach to achieve real bipartisan civil service modernization. It is clear that we cannot have reform if no one is willing to talk about their favorite issues or either political party believes it is the big loser in reform. All the civil service issues have to be on the table and considered by a bipartisan Commission that is charged with developing a comprehensive reform package that addresses the talent needs of the government, not just the parochial interests of the various constituencies. A bipartisan Commission that conducts public hearings, provides the opportunity for all interest groups to present their views, and conducts a transparent review and analysis, can work. The size of government would not be within the purview of the Commission, because it is a completely different issue.

Following a BRAC-like process, the Commission would make recommendations that President Joe Biden could accept, return to the Commission for reconsideration, or reject. Congress could reject the reforms only if both the House and the Senate voted to reject them.

Opponents of modernization most likely will not like this approach, because it makes changes more likely. Proponents of reform who want reform only on their terms will probably not like this approach either.

Some will say the Biden administration should use executive orders to make reforms happen now. I agree. Executive orders and other administrative actions are not a bad idea, because there are many needed improvements that can be done administratively. They are not enough, because some needed reforms require statutory changes and the actions that can be done administratively can also be undone by a succeeding administration. The Biden administration should proceed with administrative changes where it can to address urgent needs, but also support a Civil Service Modernization Commission with BRAC-like authority to make lasting changes that we need.

Those who argue that commissions are a Washington way of dodging issues should keep in mind that the General Schedule system that we have used for 72 years grew out of the recommendations of the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government – commonly known as the Hoover Commission. That commission, authorized by statute, was remarkably prescient, making recommendations that are still relevant today. Its recommendations included category rating, simplified and more effective performance ratings, and selection processes for supervisory jobs that focused more on ability to be a supervisor than on technical experience. The Hoover Commission also recommended that pay include locality or industry differentials. The Chair of the Commission, former President Herbert Hoover (R), was appointed by President Harry S. Truman (D). Coming so soon after the existential threat of World War II, the Hoover Commission accomplished far more than was expected of it. Perhaps the existential threats of a global pandemic, cyber warfare, and everything else we have faced recently may inspire our leaders to take a lesson from Truman and Hoover.

A two-track approach of administrative change coupled with a BRAC-like commission fulfills Biden’s promise to “Build Back Better” and approach challenges through bipartisan solutions. It also makes civil service modernization more likely to be based upon what will work best rather than who the changes please the most. It ensures modernization is based on data rather than politics. If we want modernization that can stand the test of time, it is the way to proceed.

Jeff Neal authors the blog ChiefHRO.com and was previously the chief human capital officer at the Department of Homeland Security and the chief human resources officer at the Defense Logistics Agency.

Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Subscribe to Federal Drive’s daily audio interviews on Apple Podcasts or PodcastOne.

Officials at U.S. Transportation Command say they’re getting close to awarding a multibillion dollar contract to overhaul the system for moving service members’ household goods across the country and around the world.

Gen. Steve Lyons, TRANSCOM’s commander, said this week that DoD now plans to award its new Global Household Goods Contract (GHC) by the end of April, once it’s resolved concerns Congress has raised in the last two National Defense Authorization bills.

If all goes according to plan, the new arrangement should be up and running in time for the harried summer moving season next year, Lyons said. The idea is to choose a single, large vendor to manage the entire process for the 400,000 military moves DoD funds each year, from subcontracting with hundreds of local moving and storage companies to tracking shipments and arranging for customs clearances.

Right now, those duties fall to 42 separate government-managed shipping offices, each of which hires moving companies on a one-off basis each time a service member receives permanent change of station (PCS) orders. TRANSCOM said that decentralized system is “fundamentally flawed,” mainly because it doesn’t allow for long-term contracting relationships with movers, and gives the government few ways to hold them accountable for poor performance.

“We need to gain accountability of industry and we need to improve responsibility in the department, because it’s bifurcated today,” Lyons told an audience at the Atlantic Council. “At the end of the day, we want to create the right incentive structures so that during peak season, when most of the moves take place and capacity is depleted, we can increase the capacity to support peak-season moves. That’s our objective.”

But the moving industry has expressed numerous concerns about the changes, prompting Congress to insert itself into the procurement process. This year’s National Defense Authorization Act requires TRANSCOM to wait until the Government Accountability Office conducts an assessment of the program; that report is due in two weeks. And a previous bill told TRANSCOM to conduct a business case analysis of the proposed overhaul before it moves ahead.

Lyons said a draft business case was sent to Capitol Hill last week, and the command is now working on an updated version based on the actual proposals it received in response to its contract solicitation last year.

“It was pretty consistent with what our analysis and findings were,” he said. “The numbers were pending, but we now have several very legitimate proposals that came in against the RFP. And they are within the band of the cost of the program today, so we’re in good shape there.”

Whether or not the new contracting approach is the right solution, an DoD Inspector General report issued earlier this month highlighted some of the shortcomings in the way moves are handled as of now.

Based on a sample, auditors estimated 41% of military members who moved during fiscal 2018 received their household goods shipments late; another 21% had their property damaged during a move. The IG said DoD could improve the situation by issuing “letters of warning” to companies who aren’t delivering on time. In the audit, it found that only happened for 20% of the delayed deliveries.

TRANSCOM and Lyons don’t dispute the underlying findings.

“When I took command, this was probably the one area where I got more love letters from Congress than any other — I’ve got a whole desk drawer full of them,” he said. “The basic level of transparency, accountability, support for our military families, was not where it needed to be. And I think the complaints you’re seeing, frankly, are quite legitimate.”

The U.S. military is, by far, the moving industry’s biggest customer: It’s responsible for 15% of all domestic and international moves. But even with that market power, TRANSCOM believes the current structure is simply incapable forcing the changes in quality and capacity DoD needs. Instead, officials say the problems point to the need for more comprehensive reforms they believe they’ll achieve under the GHC contract.

“The way it enhances capacity is it’s a longer term investment with our industry partners, so they’re willing to invest in capacity over time,” Lyons told the Seante Armed Services Committee last year. “And there’s no question it will improve accountability. Today, there are 950 various transportation service providers that compete for work on a transactional basis. It’s, very, very difficult across the services and TRANSCOM to maintain accountability. But the business folks know the business, and that’s the right relationship to have with a single move manager.”

But industry groups that represent moving companies have been highly skeptical.

One of the biggest challenges in the military moving market is that even though it’s very large, it’s also very seasonal: 40% of PCS moves happen during June, July and August.

Movers say that demand spike exacerbates an already-existing shortage of qualified drivers and crews, and outsourcing the management of the system can’t change that fact that on its own.

They also worry the new managed service provider will pick-and-choose which movers it contracts with in a way that forces some long-established local businesses out of the DoD market – or out of business entirely.

“In rural markets where many Army and Air Force installations are domiciled, agents rely 100% on DoD business; there is nothing else,” the International Association of Movers said in a statement last May. “The single source contractor may choose to work with a select few agents with whom they have a pre-existing relationship. Of course, all capacity is needed in the peak season, but the lopsided nature of the DoD volume will be felt even more strongly by a local agent who is not ‘in’ with the contract winner.”

A recent Federal News Network piece by Nicole Ogrysko said “the Agriculture Department is exploring whether it can rehire former employees to return to work for the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to supplement potential workforce gaps this fall.” The gaps are the result of USDA’s plan to move the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to Kansas City. Both bureaus are likely to lose more than half of their employees as a result of the move. Given the critical missions of the organizations and the specialized skills of the employees, losses of more than 50% would likely result in mission failure.

The outcome of the planned moves should not be surprising. When the government does geographic moves of large numbers of employees, the result is virtually always the same — most of the employees do not go. Some people argue the USDA workers’ refusal to move is because Washington, D.C. is a government town and they don’t want to leave it.

The Washington Examiner reported that Office of Management and Budget director and acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said, “What a wonderful way to sort of streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time.” Mr. Mulvaney said “Guess what happened? More than half the people quit. Now, it’s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker. I know that because a lot of them work for me, and I’ve tried. You can’t do it. By simply saying to people, ‘You know what, we’re going to take you outside the bubble, outside the Beltway, outside this liberal haven of Washington, D.C., and move you out to the real part of the country,’ and they quit.” Whatever one might think of Mr. Mulvaney’s policy positions, at least he has to get credit for saying what he really believes.

If the only time federal workers declined to move was when their jobs were moved outside of Washington, DC, Mr. Mulvaney’s observation might hold up. However, that is not the case. When the Defense Department moved large numbers of employees during the Base Realignment and Closure era, large numbers of employees declined moves out of “liberal” areas like the National Capital Region and “conservative” areas like Alabama, Mississippi and Texas. Federal workers are not declining jobs because of the politics of the area where they live. They are doing it because they have lives in those locations. They have family and friends, churches, civic organizations, and other ties. Most are in two-income households where packing up and moving is not so easy. And because the government has failed miserably at hiring young people, most federal workers are older and may decide that retirement (early or optional) is a better decision.

USDA relocation method not unprecedented

The USDA situation raises the question — can the civil service be broken? Although I used to think the answer is no, I now think the answer is yes. It is not easy, but it is possible to systematically dismantle the components of the career civil service. The Trump administration may be more actively attempting to weaken the civil service, but it is not the first one to do so.

President Ronald Reagan attempted to freeze federal hiring retroactive to the day he was elected, and to outsource thousands of jobs. Many jobs were outsourced and the Supreme Court ruled that a federal job offer is not a binding contract.

The Clinton administration weakened the civil service by gutting federal human resources and contracting offices. The one thing those two occupations have in common is that they are responsible for carrying out the programs that deliver talent to the government, whether that talent is in the form of federal workers or contractors. Both disciplines are still recovering. The Clinton administration also outsourced thousands of jobs in an effort to, as they often bragged, “reduce the federal workforce to the lowest level since the Kennedy administration.”

President George W. Bush attempted to weaken the civil service through MaxHR at the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Personnel System at the Defense Department, and by continuing to outsource jobs.

Even though President Barack Obama’s administration was generally pro-civil service, Obama froze federal pay and gave the Presidential Personnel Office what many would consider to be an inappropriate role in management of the Senior Executive Service.

Democrats may be more friendly to the federal workforce, but politicians of both parties seem to always tilt in favor of what they think will get them reelected, and criticizing “unelected bureaucrats” is something they think works. Political appointees of both parties often come into government with the idea that the career civil service is the enemy, because they offer information that might show that proposed policies have been tried and failed, or are not supportable by data.

I have heard people say that relocating employees out of the National Capital Region is just like BRAC in DoD, so what’s the big deal? The difference is that BRAC was specifically designed to be a nonpartisan process. Even more simply put, it was a process. There was extensive data collection. Stakeholders were consulted. Public hearings were conducted. A committee of experts made recommendations. The entire process was transparent, and data-driven, so it had credibility.

Remembering the spoils system

In the past 40-plus years, presidents and their administrations have chipped away at the foundations of the career civil service. Some have done lasting damage. Each time an administration weakens the civil service, it diminishes confidence in government. There is a real risk that continued moves to weaken the civil service will eventually break it and return us to some degree to the spoils system. In the pre-Pendleton Act government, people were hired solely because of their support for politicians and their financial backers. It was common to see ads in the papers seeking federal jobs. Qualifications were irrelevant. Commitment to the mission of an agency and even to the Constitution were not a concern.

Some folks might say that is OK, as long as their party is in power. But what happens when their party is out of power? And what happens when tens of thousands of federal managers hired through a spoils system do whatever they want? No president has the ability to monitor all of those people. Corruption was the result prior to the Pendleton Act and it would be the result now.

Some people would argue that the difficulty in firing federal employees makes it necessary to radically change the system. Much of the difficulty in firing federal workers is deliberately designed into the  career civil service. If it is too easy to fire employees, the likelihood of a spoils system increases. Even if there isn’t a real spoils system, employees who fear they will be fired if they do not pander to the political appointees will produce a similar outcome.

If we want a government that works, that functions effectively and makes policy based on facts rather than politics, a strong career civil service is the only alternative that has been proven, both in the U.S. and in other democracies, to get the job done.

Roughly 15 of every 100 nonpostal federal employees is based in Washington, D.C., on in its suburbs, which include parts of Northern Virginia, Maryland and a couple of counties in West Virginia.  Workers in the Washington-Baltimore locality pay area are paid considerably more than feds in the same grade, doing the same job, in Kansas City — between $3,000 and $15,000 a year more.

That’s important in several ways.

Pay and length of service determine the size of the lifetime annuity of federal workers. So people who spend all or most of their careers in high wage areas like Los Angeles, San Francisco-San Jose, New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia and Houston get bigger pensions than those at the same grade, salary and length of service in Butte, Montana, or Bowling Green, Kentucky, for example.

The D.C. suburbs also have some of the best public schools in the country, so for a variety of reasons a lot of feds are probably concerned that they are next on the hit-the-road list. Or are they?

Henry H., a Kansas City-based fed, said, “I lived and worked in the D.C. area for years. Then I took a job (my choice) in Kansas City.  Love it: Less traffic, nicer people, much more house for my money, less stressful working away from headquarters. I say bring them on. Don’t fight it, you will love it.”

Henry F., wrote ”Mike, while I live in D.C. now I lived in the K.C. area when in the Army. In fact when I retired we considered moving to K.C. [The] problem [was my] wife who worked as an attorney for Agriculture couldn’t find a federal job there. K.C. proper schools aren’t great but the schools in the surrounding counties are good. [A] lot to [do] there that rivals WASHINGTON. Having said that this is a bluntly political move. Congress should use a [base realignment and closure]-like process before moving forward.”

Then there’s Mark R. of Kapolei, Hawaii:

“Aloha, Mike. As a matter of fact, that’s kind of what I did a year ago. I relocated from suburban Maryland to Hawaii when my federal job gave me that opportunity. It was not a simple matter of choosing ‘paradise’ over the ‘swamp’. The relocation meant a reduction in federal base pay which implies a lower computed High-3 for the Federal Employees Retirement System retirement benefit, but living on the island of Oahu with significantly higher living costs. Yes, I do get a 10.64 untaxed COLA [cost of living adjustment] and a moderate relocation incentive for each of my first three years  here. But the net cost to be here means that my paycheck is not going as far as it did when I lived and worked in the D.C. area.

“Cost of living is one consideration, but quality of life is far, far more important and I am happy to report that I am immensely happier, safer and healthier in the outlands than I ever was in the quagmire back East. Coming here was one of the biggest decisions of my life, but it was also one of the easiest and best I have ever made.”

To compare federal pay in Kansas City versus the Washington-Baltimore area on the Office of Personnel Management’s website.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Amelia Brust

T-shirts were originally invented for bachelors who had no one (i.e. wives or mothers) to sew for them. As nearly all men’s shirts had buttons, if they lost one men who could not sew would have to use safety pins to hold the garment closed. So in 1904 the Cooper Underwear Company began selling what it called the “bachelor undershirt,” which was made of cotton stretchy enough to be pulled over the head and arms, similar to long johns which already existed. The U.S. Navy soon started issuing the shirts to sailors and their popularity exploded. Later, author F. Scott Fitzgerald was credited with first using the term T-shirt in print in “This Side of Paradise.”

Source: The New York Times

A GS-11 federal job in Kansas City has a pay range of $62,737 to $81,563, while the same job in the D.C. area pays anywhere from $69,581 to $90,461. The pay gap is even higher as one moves up the career ladder.  At Grade 14 D.C.-based employees make $12,000 to $16,000 per year more than their counterparts in Kansas City.

Would you take your kids out of some of the best public schools in the U.S., meaning those in the affluent Maryland and Virginia suburbs of D.C. — knowing that all of your future pay raises will be smaller than if you had stayed in the Washington area?

This year already, higher-paid Washington-area feds got a 2.27% pay increase compared to 1.84% for workers in the same grades doing the same jobs in Kansas City.  Since retirement income is based on length of service and salary, over time the switch could translate into a much smaller monthly retirement benefit — for life.

Would you be willing to switch allegiance from the Nationals or the Redskins for the Royals and the Chiefs, knowing it would likely mean a significantly lower lifetime retirement annuity than if you had stayed inside the Beltway?

That’s the choice facing hundreds of D.C.-based employees of the Agriculture and Interior Department. They are step No. 1 in part of the administration’s program to drain the D.C. swamp and get more civil servants closer to the programs they administer and people they serve.  About half have already indicated they won’t be going. That’s apparently fine with top political officials here and in Kansas City where many people would be happy to get the work.  As one reader in Kansas City, Robert, commented, “Reading the D.C.-based media one gets the impression the [USDA] and Interior moves are a bad thing. On the contrary, bring them on. We have very bright people who can fill them and are closer to both customer bases. And please encourage people in those jobs in D.C. to stay put. I’m sure they will come up with something.”

Last week Agriculture the the American Federation of Government Employees reached a deal designed to make the transition a little more attractive for those who will be heading west. In addition to being allowed to telework through the end of this year, workers who transfer and stay in their jobs for at least six months will be given the equivalent of one month’s pay.

The agreement covers Agriculture Department employees of the Economic Research Service and the National Institute  of Food and Agriculture. AFGE President J. David Cox said “this forced relocation is bad for employees, bad for the agricultural community, and bad for taxpayers,” but the union would represent workers regardless of where they work.

Agriculture is reportedly still looking for an actual location for the new workers. That should delight merchants and politicians in both Kansas and Missouri. According to studies related to the Base Realignment and Closure process at the Defense Department, each federal job coming into a community generates six non-federal jobs in whole or in part. D.C., with 15% of the nonpostal federal workforce, is headquarters for most federal agencies. But there are many smaller communities in Oklahoma, Alabama, Utah, New Mexico, Alaska, North and South Carolina; Illinois and Pennsylvania where Uncle Sam is the economic driver.

To compare federal pay in Kansas City versus the Washington-Baltimore area on the Office of Personnel Management’s website.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Amelia Brust

In 2017 the Japanese corn snack Umaibou used the actor Nicholas Cage’s likeness on the packaging as promotion for that country’s release of Cage’s film “Army of One.” But Cage later said he had never authorized his image for the “Deluxe Umaibou Nicolastick.”

Source: Kotaku

Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Subscribe to Federal Drive’s daily audio interviews on Apple Podcasts or PodcastOne.

When the Defense Department decided not to ask Congress to authorize a round of base closures as part of this year’s budget, it was a recognition that doing so would be an exercise in futility. After all, lawmakers have rejected those requests each year since 2012.

But Defense officials say that doesn’t mean they’ve changed their minds about the need to get rid of some of the military’s excess real estate, either through the traditional base realignment and closure (BRAC) process, or some other means that Congress finds more palatable.

“We realize that we have asked for six years, and for six years, Congress has said no. We can’t keep doing that,” Lucian Niemeyer, the assistant secretary of Defense for energy, installations, and environment told the House Appropriations Committee last week. “We have to work with you on a common way forward that will allow us to make prudent reductions in our infrastructure. We must ensure that our basic infrastructure is ideally sized to increase the lethality of our forces while minimizing the costs of maintaining unneeded capacity.”

In a report to Congress last October, the Pentagon estimated that it would have 19 percent more base infrastructure than it can put to military use, even assuming it had a force that was as large as the one that existed in 2012, prior to the last military drawdown.

In addition to seeing that excess facility footprint as wasteful and inefficient, DoD believes it simply can’t afford to adequately maintain the buildings and other facilities throughout its $1 trillion real estate portfolio. Although Congress gave the department a significant plus-up in maintenance funding this year, it’s already accumulated a backlog of $116 billion in unfunded repair projects.

“This year’s funding will not fully restore the damage caused by years of sequestration,” Niemeyer said. “Many of our facilities have degraded significantly from reduced investments in all accounts. A lot of our facilities are in either failed or poor condition. This will ultimately result in DoD facing larger bills in the future to go ahead and restore or replace facilities that deteriorate prematurely, but the stark reality is that it may be too costly to buy or sell us out of this backlog.”

In the absence of an agreed-upon path forward to restructure its basing footprint, the department says it’s doing what it can within existing law, and within the gates of its existing bases.

For now, that means a major investment in demolishing failed or underutilized structures in order to eliminate costly repair bills. That’s a step Defense officials have previously been reluctant to take, since demolition also costs money. But the department’s 2019 budget would spend roughly half a billion dollars on demolition.

The Navy, for example, plans to spend $120 million on razing unused or crumbling facilities in 2019, after having not requested any funds for demolition the year before.

The other services described similar approaches.

The Army, which estimates it has 170 million square feet of excess infrastructure, has significantly increased the percentage of its facility maintenance funds that it uses for demolition since 2016, said Lt. Gen. Gwen Bingham, the service’s assistant chief of staff for installation management.

“We took on an initiative we call ‘reduce the footprint,’ where we’re able to consolidate our soldiers into our best facilities first, use conversion authority and then demo those facilities that were in poor and failing condition that we know we wouldn’t use again,” she said. “In 2018, we have about $100 million that’s going toward demolition. In FY ‘19, we more than doubled that, well over $200 million. So we are taking it seriously and we are trying to rid ourselves of that excess, because we know it’s costing dollars.”

Similarly, the Marine Corps expects to use existing authority within its facilities budgets to demolish roughly 11 million square feet of floor space over the next several years, as part of what it calls an “infrastructure reset.”

“It’s really a comprehensive program, and demolition’s a big part of it,” said Maj. Gen. Vincent Coglianese, the commander of Marine Corps Installations Command. “We want to reduce and optimize the infrastructure footprint, make our investments in facilities with lowest life-cycle cost. And it’s really a great return on investment, because it’s about $9.4 million of cost avoidance or ability to invest in another program. The low-hanging fruit’s easy right now as we get rid of that excess and do a better job of space management in our facilities. It will be harder to get after it in the the next round, but I think it’s a really important part of our strategy.”

Read more of the DoD Reporter’s Notebook.

Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Subscribe to Federal Drive’s daily audio interviews on Apple Podcasts or PodcastOne.

The 2018 omnibus appropriations bill Congress passed two weeks ago includes some significant plus-ups to what’s been one of the most neglected areas of the Defense Department budget in recent years: the funding lines that pay for maintenance and repair of the military services’ buildings, airfields and other facilities.

In some cases, it provides enough money to prevent the existing, multibillion dollar backlog in deferred maintenance projects from getting any worse. In others, it will only slow the rate at which the backlog is growing.

Among the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force, the package provided $9.9 billion in facilities sustainment, restoration and modernization (FSRM) funding for 2018 — 58 percent more than the services received in 2017, and modestly higher than the amounts they requested for 2018.

Service-by-service, the amounts of the increases varied widely, but the biggest bump, by far, went to the Air Force, whose facility officials have previously described an FSRM funding approach that largely required it to “wait for things to break” instead of performing preventative maintenance. Its 2018 appropriation more than doubled over the year before, climbing from just under $1.7 billion to $3.4 billion.

The second-largest increase went to the Army, whose $3.5 billion funding line for FSRM represented a 56 percent boost over 2017. The Navy and Marine Corps each received smaller increases: 26 percent and 29 percent (with final budgets of $2.1 billion and $825 million, respectively).

In each case, the amounts Congress appropriated were not only higher than in 2017, but modestly more than the services had asked for in 2018. And each service except the Air Force proposed still-larger numbers in their 2019 budgets.

But even those amounts are far from sufficient to undo several consecutive years of underfunding the Defense Department has decided to accept for its facilities, which have a total plant replacement value of more than $1 trillion.

It has done so intentionally and openly, arguing that overall caps on Defense funding required it to make difficult tradeoffs in its operation and maintenance budgets, and that facilities represented the area in which it could “accept risk” with the least amount of short-term damage to military readiness. The persistent underfunding, however, is a significant contributor to the fact that between one-fifth and one-quarter of the military’s facilities are now rated as in “poor” or “failing” condition.

In their 2019 budgets, the services said the FSRM funding they were proposing would still only pay for 80 percent of what the Defense Department’s facility sustainment model calculates they should be spending in order to keep their facilities in good repair. While that’s an increase from the mid-70s range at which the services had been funding FSRM over the last several years, it’s far short of the 90 percent goal officials set when they established the model.

Buried within the services’ 2019 budget documents are acknowledgements that the spending levels they’re proposing are still not enough to make any meaningful headway against the military’s growing backlog of needed building repairs.

The Air Force was the one service that requested an FSRM budget ($2.9 billion) that was lower than its 2018 proposal, although it is still $1.2 billion higher than what it received last year.

Officials wrote that the proposal reflected “refocusing funding to other readiness priorities. …This funding level continues to increase the multi-billion dollar FSRM project backlog, increases long-term facilities costs, and increases risk of not meeting unanticipated readiness enabling requirements.”

The Navy, on the other hand, said its $2 billion facilities maintenance budget would represent a 6 percent increase over what it requested in 2018. The amount would be enough to gradually chip away at its backlog, partly because some of the funds ($120 million) would be used to entirely demolish buildings that are no longer worth saving.

But even assuming Congress funds the Navy’s request at the level its officials want, it would take another 48 years of sustained funding at the same level before the backlog is entirely eliminated.

“The Navy continues to take risk in infrastructure funding but mitigates this risk by focusing investments on capabilities directly supporting critical warfighting readiness and capabilities,” officials wrote. “The Navy’s facilities maintenance backlog is $14.3 billion, and will be reduced by $300 million per year based on similar future investment levels.”

Notably absent from DoD’s 2019 budget proposal was a request for another round of base realignments and closures (BRAC), a feature that had accompanied each of the department’s budgets since 2012. Defense experts widely agree that a BRAC round — which would eliminate at least some of DoD’s excess real estate inventory — would relieve pressure on not just its FSRM accounts, but the Defense budget as a whole.

Congress has steadfastly blocked the idea, despite Pentagon studies that show the military services have 19 percent more base infrastructure than they need, even assuming they’re funded at levels that allow the military to grow its force structure to the proportions that Defense Secretary James Mattis believes are necessary. The department had previously projected the savings from a BRAC round at $2 billion per year.

However, the 2018 omnibus bill did offer a small glimmer of hope that lawmakers will allow the department to dispose of at least some of its excess inventory.

One provision orders Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and sustainment, to work with the secretaries of the military departments to come up with a plan for selling some of its real estate by September.

But the report includes severe restrictions: DoD is only allowed to recommend the divestiture of property that’s already completely unoccupied and unused, and only if that’s been the case for five years in a row.

Read more of the DoD Reporter’s Notebook.

Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari.  Subscribe to Federal Drive’s daily audio interviews on Apple Podcasts or PodcastOne.

More than a decade after the Pentagon began to consolidate the management of 26 military installations into newly-dubbed “joint bases,” one of the Army’s top installations officials said it is clear that the idea has failed to produce the cost savings promised and that it is time to scrap the idea altogether.

The Defense Department formally proposed joint basing in 2005 as part of the latest round of base realignments and closures (BRAC). Pentagon officials projected at the time that consolidating the management and support functions of installations that were physically located near one another would save $2.3 billion over 20 years.

By 2013, DoD had lowered that estimate to $830 million. But according to the Government Accountability Office, the department has never delivered convincing evidence that the joint basing strategy could achieve even that smaller figure.

Lt. Gen. Kenneth Dahl, the commanding general of Army Installation Management Command (IMCOM), said he has seen no proof of dollar savings either, and that the idea of joint basing plainly has not worked.

“I don’t buy the data that says we’re saving money, and I don’t know any senior commanders or other people who like it,” Dahl said at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual “hot topic” conference on installation management. “[IMCOM] may be spending less money, but the mission units are probably spending more to do what they need to do, so I’m not sure we’re capturing the total costs, and our readiness may be suffering.”

Looking to save costs

The 2005 BRAC process consolidated what had been 26 separate bases into 12 for administrative purposes without changing their previous physical boundaries or missions. The names of the bases were converted into combined monikers like Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Joint Base Langley-Eustis, and Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

But GAO said any cost savings that have been achieved through that process have been because of actions taken at the discretion of individual joint base commanders, and many of those commanders have struggled to converge certain support services into shared ones. That is especially true when those services have distinct features or requirements that are unique to the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marine Corps. Some examples include military personnel services, information technology and legal advisory services.

Dahl said savings can be achieved by changing the military’s management and oversight of its bases, but that they’re to be found much higher in DoD’s organizational chart.

Rather than targeting certain installations for localized savings, he said DoD should create a new joint agency to combine all of the planning, budgeting and management functions the military services currently perform independently within their headquarters.

“Somebody’s got to man this thing, so it’s a matter of taking the best things from all of the services, running them up to the Department of Defense level, and eliminating the service proponencies for all of this inside the Pentagon,” he said. “The money to be saved is in the Pentagon and at the high level of enterprising, not picking 10 or 12 places and trying to find savings at the subordinate level.”

Dahl argued that apart from failing to save money, joint basing has had negative cultural implications for each of the military services that have been impacted by the restructuring of base management.

“There’s a human dimension to this. There’s a reason the Air Force has a different culture from the Army,” he said. “And when you try to run a joint base, you actually erode that culture, which is critical to their combat effectiveness.”

Doing so, he said, could also let DoD eliminate unnecessary inefficiencies in how some military installations are managed.

As an example, Dahl offered the Blossom Point field testing range in Southern Maryland. It is owned and managed by the Army, but at the moment, no Army missions are performed there; its only current tenants are various Navy organizations. He said IMCOM runs the testing range on a reimbursable basis, which means talent can only be hired on a temporary or term basis.

“The problem with that is when it’s purely reimbursable, you never know when they’re just going to say, ‘We don’t need anything next year,'” he said. “A Department of Defense enterprise could say, ‘Ok, what’s the requirement for DoD at Blossom Point? Let’s make it permanent, let’s program for it, let’s hire the talent that we need and build readiness. I just think that’s a better model.”

A boost in the budget

In related installations news, the omnibus appropriations bill passed by Congress and signed by the president last week delivered some good news to the Army. Each of the military services faced billions of dollars in backlogged military base maintenance, and the Army has previously said that nearly a quarter of its facilities are in poor or failing condition.

The legislation delivers $3.5 billion in facilities sustainment, restoration and modernization funding to the Army for the remainder of 2018 — more than $1 billion above what Congress provided in 2017 and almost $200 million more than the Army asked for in 2018.

Subscribe to Bureauchat’s episodes on iTunes or PodcastOne. 

In Episode 2 of Bureauchat, Federal News Radio reporters Meredith Somers and Nicole Ogrysko catch up on vacant offices in the federal government — both the literal and bureaucratic ones. They also have a special holiday treat to get you in the mood to spread federal cheer!

Why doesn’t the Office of Personnel Management have a director? President Donald Trump’s original nominee withdrew his name in July, and his second appointee is still waiting for his confirmation vote to be rescheduled in the Senate.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen inspectors general positions are vacant as well, including the office at the Department of the Interior, which has been empty for more than 3,000 days.

As for vacant offices, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is getting its first ever consolidated headquarters. In about three years a few thousand employees will move in to their new offices in Camp Springs, Maryland. USCIS leadership says having everyone under one roof will be a huge benefit to mission and employee morale.

Back in Washington, 17 members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are taking the General Services Administration to court over the Old Post Office Pavilion and lease of the Trump Hotel.

And the term “base realignment and closure” is practically a forbidden phase when it comes to the Defense Department, but it may have more optimistic reception at the Veterans Affairs Department.

Don’t forget to listen to the whole episode. Federal News Radio’s own Senior Correspondent Mike Causey joins Bureauchat for a “fireside” reading of “Twas the Night Before End of Fiscal Year.”

Subscribe to Federal Drive’s daily audio interviews on iTunes or PodcastOne.

Congress remains quiet on a pay raise for federal employees in fiscal 2018, meaning the president’s total average pay bump of 1.9 percent is getting closer to reality.

The Senate Appropriations Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee released its final version of the 2018 appropriations bill last week. The legislation does not offer an alternative to the White House’s proposal, which President Donald Trump announced at the end of August.

Trump set an average base raise of 1.4 percent, with an additional 0.5 percent adjusted for locality pay, for a total of 1.9 percent.

Congress can ultimately propose an alternative that differs from the president’s suggestion, but the House has also been silent on a pay raise for civilian federal employees.

It’s unlikely that Congress will settle the differences between the House and Senate versions and pass all appropriations bills for the fiscal year, much less before the current continuing resolution expires Dec. 8.

“The Senate Appropriations Committee has little time to finalize the regular appropriations bills and to consider additional supplemental appropriations requests for defense and for natural disaster recovery,” Chairman Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) said in a Nov. 16 statement. “We need a new budget deal to finish our work. Congress and the administration must reach agreement on acceptable top line funding levels for defense and non-defense programs.”

But with the Senate subcommittee’s 2018 appropriations bill, Congress still seems poised to accept the president’s pay proposal.

The Senate subcommittee funds civilian agencies at $637 million below the previous year. The IRS would see a $124 million funding cut in fiscal 2018.

Like the House version, the Senate bill includes none of the $790 million the General Services Administration requested for federal construction. The Federal Buildings Fund would also see $1 billion cut compared to the previous year.

Under the Senate version, the Office of Personnel Management could receive $1.8 million more than the previous fiscal year, but the legislation includes $21 million for the agency’s IT modernization efforts — about $16 million below OPM’s request of $37 million.

Beyond these appropriations bills, here are other pieces of legislation worth watching when Congress returns to Capitol Hill next week.

VA ‘BRAC’

Efforts to quickly pass legislation that would force the Veterans Affairs Department to take a holistic look at its bloated inventory of outdated, underused and vacant buildings hit a snag last week.

The House Rules Committee was scheduled to review the VA Asset and Infrastructure Review (AIR) Act last Tuesday, but lawmakers took the hearing off the agenda.

Though Democrats on the House Veterans Affairs Committee criticized the push to move forward on asset review before finding a compromise on the future of the VA Choice Program, their dissent isn’t the reason for the holdup.

Instead, a little-known law Congress passed last year is giving veterans groups and lawmakers their latest headache.

The House already passed the Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act last year, which establishes a governmentwide Public Buildings Reform board to review agencies’ vacant, underused or outdated facilities.

Under the asset sale act, the board is supposed to make recommendations to the Office of Management and Budget, which will eventually develop a governmentwide plan to dispose, sell or transfer unneeded federal property.

But the VA “AIR” bill conflicts with the premise of the Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act, which already authorized a governmentwide review of federal property.

The VA legislation would establish a nine-member Asset and Infrastructure Review Commission to review the department’s current medical facilities. The president would work with veterans service organizations to staff the commission, and the Senate would confirm all appointees.

It gives VA five years to gather its own market research and work with the presidentially-appointed commission to study the department’s assets. It would have five years to develop a series of recommendations to submit for the president’s review and Congress’ consideration.

The bill had changed considerably throughout the legislative process, and House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) led several meetings with veterans organizations to discuss and make changes to the bill.

The VA committee is working with the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which originally sponsored the Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act last year. Roe specifically is working with members to find a solution and a path forward for the VA bill, a committee spokeswoman said.

The VA AIR Act also includes $2.1 billion in additional funds for the Choice Program, which Roe said would give both Congress and the department time to finish negotiations on a new community care program.

In addition, the VA bill would also eliminate existing caps on employee bonuses and performance awards. The Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act of 2014, which hastily stood up the Choice program and introduced new “accountability” measures for VA employees and senior executives, put limits on bonuses and awards three years ago.

Bills on the move

The House will move next week on the Ensuring a Qualified Civil Service (EQUALS) Act, which extend the probationary period for most federal employees from one to two years. The Rules Committee is scheduled to review the bill next Wednesday.

Member organizations of the Government Managers Coalition have backed the bill, arguing the legislation would give new employees more time to complete specialized training and supervisors more time to evaluate their performance.

Meanwhile, the House last week passed the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, the House Speaker-sponsored bill that would authorize the creation of a new member to the C-suite: a chief evaluation officer. The legislation would put many of the recommendations from the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking in law.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has yet to mark up the bill.

Subscribe to Federal Drive’s daily audio interviews on iTunes or PodcastOne

While there’s largely bipartisan consensus VA needs to do something to consolidate and shed hundreds of vacant, underused and crumbling buildings from its inventory, lawmakers, veterans service organizations and others disagree over the details.

The VA Asset and Infrastructure Act, which House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) formally introduced Thursday, would authorize the VA secretary to develop criteria for making recommendations to change VA facilities. The criteria would get a 30-day public comment period.

Next, a presidentially-appointed 11-member commission would use the secretary’s criteria to develop its own recommendations for modernizing and realigning VA medical facilities, the legislation said. The commission must negotiate its recommendations with the VA secretary. The final report would go to the president for his approval and then to Congress.

Unless Congress disagrees and submits a formal, joint resolution expressing its disapproval, VA must begin implementing the commission’s recommendations.

“Most concerning to me, and I say this now, I would say it in four years and I would say it in eight years, is the power of the president at the end of the process,” House VA Committee Ranking Member Tim Walz (D-Minn.) said during Thursday’s hearing. “If he or she disapproves of the recommendations, the commission ends without further action.”

The bill is still a draft, and Roe acknowledged the concerns that some committee members and veterans service organizations have with the makeup of the commission and the process for implementing its recommendations.

“I don’t think we’re there yet,” Walz said. “As the legislation’s written, it takes a picture snapshot of VA infrastructure and mak[ing] a decision on going forward on that is going to have decades-long impact. We need more than a snapshot. We need to develop a process that VA can use to continually make decisions on an annual basis to ensure access gaps are identified and filled early.”

Veterans service organizations are largely concerned about the makeup of the presidentially-appointed commission and fear the legislative language sets up the potential for a “runaway committee” to implement decisions with little debate.

Veterans who currently use the VA health system should be a part of the commission, the VSOs said.

Timing is another issue. The House committee is about three weeks away from debating the next iteration of the Veterans Choice Program, which is expected to streamline VA’s various community care programs and eliminate arbitrary administrative rules for veterans who want access to privates sector providers.

“We could have a reasonable debate over whether we’re putting the cart before the horse or not,” Carl Blake, associate executive director of government relations for Paralyzed Veterans of Americans, said. “We take the position that we should know what the VA plans to do in terms of delivering care before we then decide what it’s footprint is going to look like.”

The draft legislation also gives VA stakeholders about one year to finish market analysis of the veteran population and VA’s current facilities and health specialties, which VSOs fear is too little time.

“I agree the timeline we have may not be right,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said. “This is big and this is challenging, so it may not be right. But it’s a matter of looking at what we have and what we don’t have, what we need and what we don’t need. That’s really what this is all about, and it’s based, really, on current markets and future markets. … When it comes to that, I don’t consider this to be like a BRAC. We’re not going to relocate people.”

VA medical facilities are, on average, 60 years old — five times older than most non-profit hospital buildings. They were designed to handle the influx of injured World War II and Korean War veterans in the 1940s and 1950s.

Commission or not, VA Secretary David Shulkin has said the department wants to dispose of, consolidate or sell more than 1,100 outdated, underutilized and vacant facilities within the next two years.

It’s already begun the process of disposing of or reselling 142 of those buildings now. The department has about 430 vacant or nearly empty buildings that are more than 60 years old, which cost VA about $7 million a year to maintain.

Facility consolidation was one of 13 areas of focus for Shulkin when he described the “state of VA” in May.

DoD is throwing its support behind an amendment introduced by  Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-R.I.), said Lucian Niemeyer, assistant secretary of defense for Energy, Installations and Environment said Sept. 5 at a Heritage Foundation event in Washington.

The amendment gives Congress more power over the BRAC process than the traditional BRAC process, which DoD asked for in June.

The amendment also requires the total upfront costs of  Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) to be under $5 billion. Each closure DoD recommends would have to pay for itself within 10 years, and the overall list of closures would have to achieve a net savings within seven years.

Niemeyer said he wanted cost oversight in BRAC when he worked in Congress as a staffer.

“My charge was that if we are even going to look at another authorization we had to update the law, not change if fundamentally, but update it in order to put more cost controls, greater transparency and a little bit more accountability in the process,” Niemeyer said.

Now that he is on the other side, Niemeyer said he’s working within the department to see to what degree the McCain-Reed amendment controls can be carried out.

At this point, three of the “big four” lawmakers heading the Armed Services Committees have already signed on to some form of BRAC for 2021.

Now DoD has to convince House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) and other members of Congress to approve the 2021 BRAC in this congressional session, but Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow Andrew Hunter said that may not be a deal breaker.

“It is not my sense that Chairman Thornberry is that opposed to BRAC that he would literally walk away from the [defense authorization bill],” Hunter said. “I wouldn’t see this being a bill killer.”

Thornberry said Wednesday that he is open to another BRAC round, but he wants it done right.

“I’ll definitely look at it,” Thornberry said during the Defense News Conference Sept. 6 in Arlington, Virginia. “I’ve got some basic questions. How much is it going to cost? If you’re going to have another BRAC what size is your Army? What size is your Navy? How much wiggle room do you want to leave for contingencies that may happen?”

Thornberry pointed to the 2005 BRAC as a failure, one full of cost overruns that DoD is just starting to make up.

But DoD says this round of BRAC will be more like the BRAC of the 1990s, which was considered a successful money saver.

Meanwhile, DoD is trying to frame the BRAC debate around not just budget and efficiency, but also readiness.

“You go back to Sec. Mattis’ three priorities when he took over as secretary of defense. He wants to address readiness concerns immediately, he wants to increase military capabilities and he wants to enhance lethality,” Niemeyer said. “From my perspective, working for him, the BRAC process offers us the opportunity to address readiness by providing our forces the best possible ranges and installations for them to be stationed at.”

Niemeyer said it will give DoD an opportunity to consider exactly where to add new capabilities and force structure.

“Most of all it allows us to quickly and effectively enhance the lethality of our forces by coming up with ideal stationing opportunities for combined arms,” Niemeyer said. “For us it’s not just a matter of finding efficiencies, it’s a matter of improving the military value and the effectiveness and lethality of our military forces.”

At this point the military does not even have the authority from Congress to study the effects of another round of BRAC. However, the department estimates there is about 22 percent excess installation capacity and thinks it can save $2 billion a year by closing some bases.

Niemeyer said it’s hard for DoD to do an analysis without creating hysteria about what bases might close.

“Until with get an authorization there will be no analysis … the notion that there is a list of base closures running around the Department of Defense is absolutely false,” Niemeyer said.

Niemeyer said it is trying to update some of its numbers on BRAC based on 2012 data and is in the process of getting that to Congress.

Niemeyer said DoD needs to look at where it can station its forces so they can perform more effectively, closer to their homes and families. Spreading them out at unneeded bases may not be the best use of their placement.

“I think you’re starting to see a growing swell of support for what BRAC can do for an opportunity for those bases that feel that they have a significant contribution to national security,” Niemeyer said.

House Armed Services Ranking Member Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) also introduced a provision supporting BRAC.