The comission model

Its military mission completed, the military Base Closure and Realignment Commission can be mothballed for the rest of this decade. Its design, however, should live on in the form of similar federal task forces created to confront issues equally defiant of congressional action.

In the past seven years, four different base-closure commissions have shut down 250 military installations. Maine, grateful for Kittery and Brunswick, still smarts from the pain of Loring, but nationwide, the aggregate impact of that and similar sacrifices is approximately $56 billion a year. It’s a significant contribution to balancing the budget, which today would be running a deficit at least 25 percent larger were it not for the difficult work performed by these commissions.

Similar panels, as members of Congress have suggested, could be formed to resolve the partisan dilemma on campaign financing, or take on the gargantuan task of trimming the fat from the federal budget or shrinking the size of government.

Gov. Angus King already is doing it in Maine, in modified fashion, with the Productivity Realization Task Force. That group, drawn largely from the private sector, will go where no group has gone before: into the heart of the Augusta bureaucracy. Its mission is to find $45 million in savings over a two-year budget cycle and report back to Gov. King. The governor will package the results and offer them to the Legislature, which would be compelled politically to either accept them or produce an alternative of equivalent value.

In early discussion of the task force, it was clear state workers considered it a doomsday machine that could consume entire agencies, even departments. It now appears to be taking a more benign approach, finding 1,000 jobs to eliminate, most of them through attrition.

Some layoffs, however, are expected, and the King administration expects the process and its results to be controversial, but one point no one contests: If this task force was not empaneled and turned loose in the capital, the job would never be done.

The Legislature, like the Congress, lacks the collective commitment and will to go after programs its own members build, and each is overmatched by a shared fear that any programs cut would be politically unpopular, jeopardizing re-election.

Those who wrote the constitutions for Maine and the federal system would groan if they could see the monstrosities grown from simple ideas. They would be shocked by elected officials so timid that non-accountable task forces were created to do the dirty work of cleaning out bloated governments.

The ideal? No. Not even close. But the commission model has strong arguments in its favor. It has demonstrated that it is politically possible, and it works.