Keeping promises

At first glance, the possibility that a new military accounting center at Limestone might be closed just two years after it was opened to ease the pain of losing an air force base looks like one more planning blunder by the Department of Defense.

But this taking of the long way ’round to nowhere is not merely Pentagonian — it’s downright congressional. And it’s downright cruel. As long as lawmakers continue to talk fiscal responsibility while dishing out the pork back home, innocent folks, like the 325 Defense Finance Accounting Service workers in the County, will continue to get hurt.

Congress wanted, and got, a balanced budget. Same for the line-item veto. Then, it throws the balanced budget out of kilter by padding it with goodies for the home districts, including billions in unneeded defense construction projects, and caps off this absurd masquerade by overturning the president’s line-item veto. All the while preaching the need for government to operate more like business.

If business operated this way — raising hopes and dashing them, making commitments and breaking them, rallying the public and then shunning them, CEOs would be tarred and feathered on a daily basis.

There are 17 DFAS centers around the country, created earlier in this decade to de-centralize the Pentagon’s bill-paying and payroll work. Now, eight of those will be closed unless they can prove their ability to compete with the private sector. Perhaps, before it loads up moving trucks with the contents of eight accounting offices, before it goes through another replay of this wasteful consolidation/deconsolidation routine, before it causes further harm to those it has already harmed, the Pentagon might find out just exactly what practices make private sector accountants so darned efficient and simply adopt them.

That communities that are home to existing military installations live under the constant threat of closure and economic devastation while Congress funds unneeded installations elsewhere says something not at all flattering about the political will of elected leaders to do what’s right. That public agency managers increasingly hold the threat of privatization over the heads of their workers says even less about their managerial skills. In this case, the threat is unconscionable and silly — whether done in the public or private sector, accounting is accounting. In all cases, a promise is a promise.