A House panel likely will hold hearings on the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), in the wake of a damning report from government auditors, and may try to restrict funding for the Navy program, its chairman said.
Yet Randy Forbes (R-Va.) told reporters Tuesday that any action on the LCS will come after the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) crafts its version of the fiscal year 2014 defense authorization bill on Wednesday.
That’s because the report on the shipbuilding program, from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), is only in draft form and a final version is not expected until July, said Forbes, chairman of the HASC Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee. The draft advises Congress to restrict future funding of the LCS program until the Navy finished studies of the ship’s design to determine if the 24 vessels under contract need to be redesigned, according to Bloomberg.
Forbes said the version of the report he saw is “very concerning.”
“It’s concerning because of the intensity of the report, if the report stays the way it is,” he said at a Defense Writers Group breakfast. His subcommittee will monitor the final report “very, very carefully,” and “probably” will hold hearings examining its finding after its expected summertime release, he said.
“We’re going to be looking very, very carefully at what the report looks like in its final form, what those hearings tell us, and then we’ll make decisions about what we do with it,” Forbes said.
Such action likely would come after the full House passes the FY ’14 defense authorization bill, which sets Pentagon policy for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1. Yet Forbes said House and Senate lawmakers could agree to restrict LCS funding in a subsequent version of the legislation that they are expected to negotiation in a conference committee later this year. Or, House lawmakers could act even before the conference committee, he said.
“I will not take that off the table…that we…take some more-stringent actions on the LCS program before the conference comes out,” Forbes said.
He said he will not offer any amendments at the HASC markup of the defense bill on Wednesday, because he doesn’t want to “make decisions until the jury’s actually out on that.”
“I think based upon the Navy’s commitment to this (program), and where they are, I think it was appropriate for us to say, Navy, we’re going to let you run this through the steps that you feel you need to do it,” Forbes said. “But that doesn’t mean we give them unlimited checking accounts or that we don’t put controls on that.”
Forbes said he does not have any major seapower-related amendments planned for Wednesday’s HASC markup.
Looking ahead, he said he expects friction with the Navy in the near future on LCS as well as the House’s attempt to stop the service from retiring seven cruisers.
The House Appropriations Defense subcommittee (HAC-D) also plans to hold its annual bill markup today, which will be of the budget-setting defense appropriations bill for FY ‘14. The HAC-D calls for giving the Navy $1.79 billion to buy the four LCSs in FY ’14, according to a version of the legislation the panel released yesterday. Today’s HAC-D markup session will be closed to the public.