The Defense Department plans to allow each armed service and defense agency to manage its own mentor-protégé program.

The program is currently run by DOD’s Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization. Under the proposal, each service and agency OSDBU would manage its program independently.

The proposed rule is FAR Case 2003-010 in the April 6 Federal Register. Comments are due by June 7.

The likely Democratic presidential nominee, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, proposes cutting 100,000 federal contractors as part of his plan to reduce the budget deficit.

Kerry outlined his economic proposals April 7 in a speech at Georgetown University in Washington.

Paul Light, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, estimated that in 1999 the federal government employed 5.6 million contractors, three times the number of civilian federal employees.

The Defense Department will disclose its plans for overseas military bases by next February, before it begins the process of closing and realigning domestic bases, Congress Daily reported.

A senior planning officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Lt. Gen. James Cartwright, said the plan will focus on an “expeditionary mode” that provides flexibility to deal with uncertain threats, unlike the Cold War military that focused on the Soviet Union. He spoke at the annual Navy League meeting in Washington.

DOD is expected to reduce the number U.S. forces at large bases in Western Europe and East Asia, moving thousands of them back to the United States or to smaller bases in Eastern Europe and perhaps Central Asia. Those changes are likely to affect plans for closing and realigning domestic bases, which will be formulated next year.

President Bush has nominated Albert Frink, co-founder of the California carpet maker Fabrica International, to the new post of assistant secretary of commerce for manufacturing and services. The president created the job last year to combat the loss of manufacturing jobs.

His first nominee, Anthony Raimondo, withdrew after revelations that his company, Behlen Manufacturing, had opened a plant in China.