Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) members are eyeing defense policy revisions including modifying the Pentagon’s aircraft and ship plans, changing rules for depot maintenance of military equipment, and restricting cost-plus contracts.
The SASC’s subcommittees began marking up their portions of the fiscal year 2013 defense authorization bill yesterday, and the full committee hopes to hold its final markup session Thursday night. Before even starting the bill-writing meetings yesterday, the Democrat-controlled panel was at odds with the Republican-led House; the lower chamber passed a $554 billion FY ’13 defense authorization measure last week that is $4 billion larger than President Barack Obama’s Pentagon budget proposal, spurring a veto threat from the White House. SASC Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said the SASC bill will stick with Obama’s $550 billion topline figure for the base defense budget.
Just what makes up that $4 billion discrepancy between the House and Senate versions of the Pentagon policy-setting legislation remains to be seen. The House bill seeks to add authorized funding to the Pentagon’s proposal for efforts including preventing the Navy from retiring Aegis cruisers early, keeping the Global Hawk Block 30 drone, continuing production of M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and adding advanced funding for a second Virginia-class submarine in 2014.
SASC Ranking Member John McCain (R-Ariz.) told reporters yesterday he is looking at changes to the Pentagon’s weapons request, including its plans for the multi-service F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. He has voiced concerns in recent months about the potential for more F-35 cost overruns beyond $150 billion already incurred.
“We are looking at some (F-35) conditions in reporting requirements and…various options,” McCain said. “But the costs are still outrageous.” He said he wants to “making sure…taxpayer dollars aren’t on the hook for the cost overruns, those kinds of things.”
The FY ’13 budget the Pentagon sent Congress in February calls for cutting $15.1 billion in previously planned F-35 spending by delaying the purchase of 179 planes over the next five years, to ensure research and development issues are better resolved in testing.
McCain also is keeping an eye on the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program during the markups.
“We’ll be looking at it as well…getting updates on costs and lack of progress,” the senator said about the program with two ship designs that has hit multiple roadblocks. “It’s another scandal.”
The House-passed bill includes F-35 and LCS provisions, including requirements that the Air Force and Navy establish initial-operational capability dates for the three F-35 variants by the end of this year and that the Government Accountability Office review the LCS program.
McCain cited another concern the House bill addresses: Pentagon investment in alternative-energy research.
“We need to get that under control, it’s an incredible waste of the taxpayer dollars,” said McCain, who has criticized the Navy’s work to help develop a commercially viable biofuel market.
The senator, meanwhile, said he wants to stop the Navy’s plan to retire seven Aegis cruisers early.
“I think can make adjustments to other programs…to help for example keep the cruisers in commission,” he said. “We can move money around, it’s not as if we have to automatically have an increase.”
The SASC’s Readiness subcommittee, meanwhile, marked up its portion of the defense authorization bill in an open meeting yesterday, making it the only one of the six subpanels to open its bill-writing session to the public.
The Readiness panel is calling for repealing recent changes to rules dictating how depot-level maintenance of military equipment is shared between government and private facilities. Critics of those recent changes, in the FY ‘12 defense authorization act, said they could deprive businesses of work and lead to job losses, among other things. The FY ’12 law broadened the definition of what type of work on military equipment falls under the definition of depot maintenance. Such maintenance is divided evenly between government and private-sector depots, so changes to the type of work done could tinker with the division of duties and shift some types of work away from the private businesses, critics say.
Multiple SASC members blasted those depot changes, which were adopted in the final House-Senate conference committee on the FY ’12 bill last December.
“We propose to repeal the depot maintenance provisions that we accepted in last year’s conference, enabling us to avoid costly shifts of resources from the public sector to the private sector, and vice versa,” SASC Readiness Chairwoman Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said during her subcommittee’s markup yesterday.
Readiness Ranking Member Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) said the depot changes adopted in the FY ’12 bill “threatened to upset the delicate balance in the defense-industrial base between the public and private workload.” She lauded the subcommittee’s proposed repeal of the FY ’12 provisions, saying the “public-private balance in our depots was working.”
The Readiness subcommittee also approved a series of acquisition reforms, including limits on “the use of cost-plus contracts for the production of major defense acquisition programs,” McCaskill said. Other acquisition proposals the panel approved would: lower the cap on executive compensation for contractors to $400,000; require at least half of the work for a contract be performed by the prime contractor or a subcontractor identified in the contract; and change Pentagon profit policy to “ensure contractor profits are clearly tied to their performance,” she said.
The full SASC is slated to start its closed markup session of the combined defense authorization bill today.