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Townhall
Obama’s Best Sport:
Kicking the Can
By Lurita Doan
Obama’s recent announcement that he will appoint a commission to
propose and possibly oversee the closing and sale of obsolete federal
buildings is yet another delaying tactic which allows Team Obama to
wear the mantle of fiscal hawks, serious about cost-cutting, while
delaying the need for immediate action to reduce the ever-ballooning
deficit. Kicking the can down the road to delay tough decision-making
is becoming President Obama’s best sport.
There are three good reasons why Americans should be skeptical of
Obama’s recent proposal.
First, Americans have seen Obama use commissions to provide cover and
to buy time. The recent Fiscal commission is a prime example. Taking
almost a year to assemble and taking another year to analyze data and
prepare their proposal, the commission bought time for the President to
posture. When the Fiscal Commission did report their findings and urged
immediate action, their counsel was immediately ignored by Team Obama.
It would seem that the Obama has learned that the value of commissions
in to provide a fig leaf for Administration failures. Americans should
be concerned that should a commission produce a set of recommendations
that would actually require the president to make a tough decision,
that it will be ignored.
The most recent announcement from the White House to sell off unneeded
or underutilized federal office buildings proposes theestablishmen of a
commission modeled after the Pentagon’s Base closure and Realignment
Commission (BRAC). The obvious problem is that if President Obama did
not take the advice of the commission that he hand-picked, on an issue
critical to our nation’s survival as a super-power, why should
Americans have any confidence that Obama will act on the
recommendations of a “BRAC-like” commission on federal buildings?
Second, the White House did not admit the BRAC process is expensive and
closures take years to implement. Duplicating BRAC for federal
buildings will require a huge staff, development of countless proposals
that must be vetted through congress, and logistical planning to move
or eliminate hundreds to thousands of government employees. These kinds
of BRAC decisions will take longer to implement than Obama’s time in
office and even longer to derive the cost-savings currently proposed by
Obama.
Meantime, using the closing of federal buildings as proof of his
vigorous cost-cutting administration, Obama may continue to pile up
additional non-essential spending, citing the savings from the GOV-BRAC
closings as his “pay-go” plan. The end result is that Americans will
find that the country is even more in debt than before Obama morphed
into a “fiscal hawk”.
Third, and perhaps most important, the biggest obstacle to Obama’s
proposal is his own team. Democrats have long loaded “social justice”
legislation into a plethora of regulations that would need to be
eliminated before Obama’s proposal would have a hope of succeeding. For
example, one of the biggest deterrents to disposal or re-sale of
obsolete federal properties is the McKinney Act, which requires that
all properties be offered as homeless shelters before the property can
be auctioned for public use.
As the former Administrator of the U.S. General Services, I have some
experience in the kinds of activities the President is proposing, and I
can assure the citizens of this country that once a federal building is
proposed as obsolete in its use and plans are developed to sell the
property and return the proceeds to the Treasury, the biggest obstacle
is congress.
Every federal building exists in some congressman’s district and
represents assets, implicit and explicit, that accrue to that district
or state. Federal building closings are often fought aggressively by
the congressman or senator affected, and accusations of partisanship
are often bandied. Sometimes a congressman cannot believe that closing
a property in his district might be in the nation’s best interest and
the Member incorrectly assumes there must be some kind of political
bias afoot.
I have experienced the detrimental effects of the politically-correct
posturing of Democrats in congress, where “social-justice” ideology is
advanced without any thought to the actual consequences. One of the
most extreme examples of the abuse of the McKinney Act in practice
involved a historic coastal fort in North Carolina dating back to the
French Indian War. The fort was no longer a working military base and
was slated for BRAC closure.
Non-profit organizations hoped to convert the facility to a museum and
were willing to purchase the property from the government to ensure
future generations would have the opportunity to see where a part of
our nation’s history occurred. Instead, because of the McKinney Act,
the property was slated to become a homeless shelter.
Not too surprisingly, when local civic leaders discovered that federal
law would require the historic fort to be converted into a homeless
shelter they were aghast. Civic leaders at the state and local level
wanted to make their own decision on housing and resented the big foot
of the federal government forcing them to convert federal buildings to
social causes like homeless shelters, against the wish of the local
community.
As a result, I was forced to take the situation to Congress, appealing
to congressmen and senators alike for a waiver. It came down to what
was, literally, the last hour, and then-senator Elizabeth Dole was
gracious enough to put her name forward and sign the waiver needed to
preserve the historic property for posterity.
The key point here is that federal laws exist which hamper the orderly
sale and disposition of unneeded federal property. If Obama would
concentrate on removing those barriers, he would make the task much
easier. Huge savings could be achieved if President Obama would
implement the regulatory reform he promised. Eliminating some of the
nonsensical, impractical statutes put in place by his own team would
allow experienced, career government employees to act more swiftly and
more effectively to trim the fat than any commission the President
might eventually assemble.
The problem is Obama seems to have become most adept at the
Kicking-the-Can strategy and even more adept at avoiding any kind of
accountability for his decisions. Pity.
Read it at Townhall
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