A federal commission voted yesterday to move Washington's historic Walter Reed Army Medical Center and nearly 1,900 jobs to Bethesda, part of a sweeping military realignment that would expand a national center for medical treatment and research in Maryland.
The decision by the Base Closure and Realignment Commission paves the way for building another hospital on the campus of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. The two facilities would merge into an expanded, 340-bed hospital to be called Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in honor of the nearly century-old Army hospital.
Also yesterday, the panel, known as the BRAC, approved the Pentagon's final job recommendations for Fort Meade, which would send about 750 more workers - mostly in the area of approving security clearances - to the Army post in Anne Arundel County. That would bring the number of new jobs going to Fort Meade to nearly 5,700.
Maryland officials expect that when the commission finishes revising the Pentagon's recommendations - which could happen today - the state will be in line for a net gain of more than 6,600 defense jobs, many of them high-paying scientific jobs.
Those job gains for Maryland are in line with the military realignment package the Pentagon proposed in May.
The independent commission, composed of nine former political and military leaders, has spent four months reviewing recommendations to close or consolidate 62 major bases and to close more than 800 other facilities across the country.
The Defense Department has estimated that the realignment would save nearly $50 billion over the next 20 years. A recent report by the Government Accountability Office put the savings at about half that.
Some of the 750 jobs that would be transferred to Fort Meade would come from Northern Virginia as part of a realignment package that would move 23,000 defense workers out of leased office space.
The Defense Department sought to move many of those workers to outlying military bases in the Washington area, including Fort Meade, for security reasons.
Fort Meade and Aberdeen Proving Ground have had a net gain of about 7,700 jobs in the past two days. APG would grow by more than 2,000 jobs based on the commission's vote Wednesday to transfer thousands of weapons researchers from Fort Monmouth, N.J.
Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, who represents the two bases, called the past two days "the biggest ... of my political career."
