The House is moving to prevent DoD from initiating another round of base realignments and closures, adding preventive language to its DoD authorization bill up for a vote this week.
As with the Senate and White House requests, the bill authorizes funding above the Budget Control Act level, in this case at $552.1 billion.
In addition to the BRAC prohibition, the bill addresses a few other contentious areas. For example, while it would exclude the salaries of large contractors’ top five earners from allowable expenses on federal contracts and freeze the current employee compensation baseline by only adjusting for the economic cost index going forward – it rejects a White House proposal to cap individual industry salaries at the President or Vice President’s salary level, calling such a limit “inappropriate and arbitrary,” arguing that it could drive away talent in some cases.
The bill would prohibit the military services from pursuing LEED energy efficiency standards if the investment is not fully offset by the amount of energy conserved, raising questions about how these types of expenditures are justified.
The committee also approved an amendment sponsored by Rep. Rob Andrews, D-N.J., that would extend a service contract-spending cap through fiscal 2015.
The American Federation of Government Employees issues a statement about the amendment, saying it would fight to retain this reform so that caps on the federal workforce don’t merely inflate the contractor workforce to compensate for reduced manpower.
