Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
As congressional inaction on the debt crisis deepens the threat of indiscriminate ax wielding on defense programs by next January, advocates for base grocery stores hope to emboss a "hands off" sign on military commissaries and their $1.3 billion annual appropriation.
In particular, they want Congress to ignore a "dangerously flawed" cost-saving option presented last year by the Congressional Budget Office, to merge the commissary system and the three military exchange services into a single base resale operation.
The CBO idea is to phase out all taxpayer support of commissaries, allow grocery prices to rise by at least 7 percent and then soften the blow for active duty families by paying an annual grocery allowance of $400.
Retirees and other store patrons would get no such allowance. They would just see shopping discounts decline under what CBO has labeled "Discretionary Spending — Option 6" in its 2011 Reducing the Deficit report.
Like a can of beans on a grocer's shelf, the cost-saving option is among many already priced and endorsed by CBO, which gives them credibility with deficit hawks and with congressional leaders, who might be pressured by approaching deadlines to slash federal spending fast.
Patrick Nixon, president of the American Logistics Association, which represents manufacturers, brokers, distributors and service companies that do business with the military resale system, aggressively attacked the CBO military store consolidation option during a June 7 hearing of the House armed services subcommittee on military personnel.
Later, in an interview, Nixon said he had good reasons for doing so.
First, though CBO has a reputation for objectivity and solid research, in this case its assumptions on cost-savings and the after-effect of consolidation on store operations simply "unravel" on inspection, he said.
Yet the consequences, if the option were adopted, likely would include over time the demise of discounted grocery sales on military bases, Nixon said.
A second reason that the ALA, the Armed Forces Marketing Council and other lobbyists for military stores want flaws in the CBO option exposed is the debt crisis, a "perfect storm ... with extreme implications for every American," Nixon said, and which a bitterly divided Congress seems unable to address.
Suspicions and partisanship resulted last year in a mindless "sequestration" tool being inserted in the 2011 Budget Control Act.
So if Congress fails to reach a fresh compromise on spending cuts and tax increases by Jan. 1, 2013, sequestration would be triggered automatically and begin to lop nearly $600 billion off defense programs over the next decade. Witnesses agreed with Wilson that would be "catastrophic."
The fresh cuts would be atop $487 billion in defense cuts over 10 years that Republicans and Democrats agreed on as part of last year's budget deal. So far commissaries would be fully funded under the Obama administration plan to implement the first wave of cuts and the House and Senate versions of the fiscal 2013 defense authorization bill.
If sequestration occurs, however, every major program could be cut 8 to 12 percent, according to one estimate of the complex sequestration formula. And whether sequestration occurs, or some alternative deficit reduction package is adopted, lawmakers might be tempted to pull CBO options off the shelf to protect more favored or vital defense programs.
Tom Philpott can be contacted at Military Update, P.O. Box 231111, Centreville, Va. 20120-1111, or by e-mail at:
