Mike Levin: “As I indicated before, Mr. President, since we are talking about estimated savings, the IG that was requested by the…”

“As I indicated before, Mr. President, since we are talking about estimated savings, the IG that was requested by the Department of Defense to make these estimates found that the costs were overestimated by $148 million and savings underestimated by $614 million, which means in this study by the DOD IG, there were significantly greater savings than had been predicted by the BRAC commission. That, of course, is somewhat different--very different--in terms of the evidence of that presented by the distinguished Democratic leader. We are not sure whether the leader's numbers came from the original Department of Defense estimates before they went to BRAC, and that is something we will check out, because in all but one case, the commission produced savings significantly less than had been requested by the Department of Defense. Finally, relative to the argument that the cost of previous base closures have been underestimated, one of the reasons the original Department of Defense estimates were high was that they estimated the savings from the sale of land. We changed the rules in the middle on that one. The revenue never materialized because we changed the rules, very consciously, to provide that most base property would be given away when the base was closed rather than sold. We did that to make economic redevelopment more feasible. That has benefited all of our States just about where these closings have taken place.”