Lobbyists, legislators still await full release of BRAC info

With only three months to go until the independent Base Closure and Realignment Commission submits its recommendations to the White House, many congressional staffers, lobbyists and analysts are spending the summer sifting through Pentagon information they say is neither well organized nor user friendly.

Defense Department officials generated hundreds of thousands of pages of documents when making their own list of base-closure recommendations, gathering more data than in any of the government's previous BRAC rounds.

"The extent of the information that has been provided to the commission and the Congress is unprecedented in terms of volume and level of detail," the Pentagon said in a statement earlier this week.

The information, including data on installations the Pentagon wants to shutter, is the key to lawmakers and lobbyists pleading their case to the BRAC commission to keep their bases open.

But the quantity of the information released so far is both a blessing and a curse. For those who must sift through documents, meeting minutes and other information page by page, the task of finding installation-specific data can be grueling and time consuming, sources said.

"It's like a needle in a haystack going through this," said an aide to a member of Congress affected by the BRAC. "We still don't know if we have all the information."

A House aide who has reviewed the information noted that "dumping data on people so they drown in their own information is not helpful, it's not a success."

Congressional staffers and lobbyists representing local communities also have voiced frustrations in searching for information pertaining to specific bases.

"It was like somebody took an MBA course in how to make things difficult," said Barry Rhoads, president of the Rhoads Group and a staff member on the 1991 BRAC commission.

Retired Army Brig. Gen. Philip Browning has already printed out enough information from the Defense Department's Web site to fill 10 thick binders with Army installation data, which he is searching for Georgia-specific base data.

"The bottom line now is that it's just a ton of material. And I'm not being critical; I have to admire it," said Browning, who now sits on the Georgia Military Affairs Coordinating Committee.

For the last several weeks, lawmakers have prodded the Pentagon to release all its BRAC-related information quickly, to give congressional staff and local communities adequate time to review the reasoning behind the department's recommendations.

Earlier this week, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairwoman Collins and ranking member Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., issued a subpoena requiring the Pentagon to turn over all BRAC information by Monday.

The Pentagon made public much of the information late last month, but has not finished scrubbing all documents for classified information.

At the same time, they must upload the documents on the department's Web site, a timely endeavor, a Pentagon spokeswoman said Thursday.

So far, the department has posted on its site justifications and analyses of each of the 222 recommendations, as well as reports from each of the services and cross-service groups.

Congress still is awaiting additional information on military-value scores, which were the Pentagon's primary consideration in making the base-closure recommendations. "Without that, you can't challenge the scoring and thus have no way of making an argument," the House aide said.