Like any terrifying story, the drawn-out saga of America’s budget deficit makes people stare with disbelief and yet desperately want to turn away their eyes. In the summer blockbuster that had audiences simultaneously cringing and rubbernecking, the president was able to avert a government shutdown by negotiating a budget deal with the Republican syndicate that included the establishment of a “supercommittee” to find another $1.2 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years. If the committee fails, a set of automatic cuts will take place, roughly divided between military and domestic programs. The prospect of “deep” reductions in national security spending is supposed to make Republicans more amenable to compromise. That willingness to deal has yet to appear, however, and it has been the Democrats instead who have offered, in their habitually self-defeating preemption, several trillion dollars in cuts in entitlement programs.
If you dig deep enough, though, you can find some stirrings of bipartisanship, at least in the Senate. Our elected representatives are desperate to find cuts in military spending that won’t lead to job loss among their constituents. Weapons systems, however old-fashioned or redundant, at least keep assembly lines humming. But one cut would not compromise employment at home: U.S. overseas bases.
Earlier this month, Montana Democrat Jon Tester and Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison introduced a proposal to create a commission to evaluate U.S. military presence overseas. The bill [.pdf] does hold out the possibility that such a commission might recommend opening new bases overseas. But that’s just hedging bets. Tester and Hutchison are committed to examining “the potential benefits and savings realized by closing outdated overseas military bases.” In a letter to the supercommittee calling for immediate cuts in the overseas base budget, Tester and Hutchison were joined by two other Democrats, Mark Begich of Alaska and Ron Wyden of Oregon, and two other Republicans, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.
We’re not talking chump change here. A domestic version of this commission, the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, achieved an initial savings of $16 billion and another $6 billion of annual savings through the closure of 97 bases and 55 realignments through 2001. The 2005 round anticipated [.pdf] roughly $1 billion a year in additional savings through 2011. But closing domestic bases raises questions about the economic impact for local communities and on jobs that closing overseas bases doesn’t (at least for American voters).
