During this week’s presidential debate, Republican candidate Sen. John McCain cited the Base Realignment and Closure process as a nonpartisan model he might use to reform Medicare and other major government programs by cutting costs and improving performance.
While BRAC has benefitted Fort Leonard Wood and Pulaski County by first bringing the officer training component of the Engineer School from Fort Belvoir and then bringing the Chemical School and Military Police School from Fort McClellan, it’s also severely hurt small towns where local military installations were closed or their operations curtailed.
During a tour of Missouri, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden said in a Friday interview with the Waynesville Daily Guide that Fort Leonard Wood probably won’t have to fear any future BRACs.
“You train truck drivers out there, you train the MPs, you do chemical warfare stuff; the importance of your base is only going to increase; not decrease,” Biden said. “The key under BRAC is that you’ve just got to make sure that the statistics used by the BRAC commission are in fact accurate; they haven’t always been, and secondly you’ve got to make sure it doesn’t allow political influence to seep into the decisionmaking process.”
However, Biden said the BRAC model doesn’t apply well to cutting costs in programs intended to provide health care to needy Americans.
“You saw what happened to your base under the latest BRAC realignment; you actually gained a boost and it’s my understanding you gained an investment in terms of how important your base is,” Biden said. “But it’s not like you’re comparing bases in terms of efficiency … it’s a little in my view like you’re comparing apples and oranges to compare a BRAC process with the oversight of the congress to Medicare. The only thing we know about Medicare is John McCain said to get savings in the budget is he is going to cut Medicare.”
Key McCain advisors have not only advocated cutting Medicare but also taxing employer-provided insurance benefits, Biden said.
“It’s a complicated formula, but the end result would be he taxes as income the benefits you receive from your employer, and the way his formula works, the end result would be if you didn’t tax the payroll tax … you’d end up losing about $150 billion in Medicare, which would be cutting Medicare by about a third,” Biden said. “I think the reason why John brought up the BRAC analogy is he’s trying to find a way to cut Medicare.”
A major drug bust this week by the Lake Area Narcotics Enforcement Group led to 20 people being charged with a variety of drug offenses, but LANEG officials have warned that planned federal cuts in the Byrne/JAG grant program could mean a 21 to 50 percent cut in local joint anti-drug operations. Drug busts like what happened this week probably won’t happen if the planned federal cut happens in 2009, LANEG spokesmen warn, and the organization will probably have to revert to reactive steps such as cleaning up clandestine drug labs found by other agencies rather than a proactive approach of undercover investigations.
Biden, who sponsored the COPS grant program that provides special funding to local police departments on a declining scale to hire new police officers, said he’d like to see the Byrne/JAG drug program funding cuts reversed. That would cost about $1.1 billion, but it’s a good investment, Biden said.
Biden said immigration rules, customs enforcement, and other conditions that enable methamphetamine labs and other drug trafficking operations are largely beyond the control of local law enforcement, so federal officials should help.
“Your local people don’t have any control over that, and it’s the role of the federal government to help,” Biden said.
Biden, who made his own bid for president before dropping out early in the Democratic presidential primary process, acknowledged that he’s had differences with Barack Obama.
Those differences are “tactical” and not “substantial,” Biden said, and don’t affect his ability to support a candidate he once opposed.
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