The head of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) said yesterday he still sees a need for a second F-35 Joint Strike Fighter engine despite the current fiscal pressures on the Pentagon budget.
“The reason we need it is still just as strong as ever,” HASC Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.) said yesterday after a speech at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington.
The policy-setting defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2012, crafted by McKeon’s committee and passed by the House in May, includes provisions intended to keep alive the F-35 alternate engine, the F136. The bill would allow second-engine contractors General Electric [GE] and Rolls-Royce to use F136 equipment to continue developing it at its own cost and also ban the Pentagon from spending money on performance improvements to the main engine, made by Pratt & Whitney [UTX], if it does not support a second engine.
HASC spokesman Claude Chafin maintained yesterday the self-funding plan for the alternate engine is “a new model that has promise…as people look for ways to manage the defense budget more efficiently.”
The Pentagon believes the second-engine program is unneeded and too expensive, and terminated it in April shortly after Congress voted to kill FY ‘11 funding for it. Yet some powerful lawmakers, including on the HASC, support the program they maintain is affordable over the long term and inserts needed competition into the F-35 engine-development effort.
The General Electric-Rolls-Royce team offered to spend its own money to continue developing the alternate engine through the end of FY ‘12. The White House, though, said President Barack Obama could veto the House-passed defense authorization bill over language that would allow it to do so.
It remains to be seen how the House’s self-funding plan will fare in Congress. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s (SASC) version of the FY ’12 defense authorization bill does not include such a plan, and by contrast has language explicitly banning the Pentagon from spending development money on the F136. The full Senate has not yet weighed the SASC’s legislation.
The budget-setting defense appropriations bill for FY ’12 that the House passed in May has no funding for the alternate engine. The Senate Appropriations Defense subcommittee (SAC-D) will mark up its version of the FY ’12 legislation today.
Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), chairman of the full Senate Appropriations Committee and its defense subpanel, has said he doubted the Senate would agree to revive funding for the second engine. Yet Inouye, an alternate-engine supporter, said in June he was weighing the House-passed self-funding scheme (Defense Daily, June 16).
Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter argued in a June 13 letter that the General Electric-Rolls-Royce proposal to pay for the F136 engine itself is “simply not realistic.”
“Providing this government property to the contract would definitely have a cost to the government,” Carter wrote on June 13 to Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I/D-Conn.), whose state is home to Pratt & Whitney (Defense Daily, June 23).
The self-funding provision in the House-passed defense authorization bill would require the Pentagon to preserve and store more than 250,000 items of government property purchased under the F136 development contract and provide it to General Electric-Rolls-Royce “at no cost to the federal government.”