Jan 1, 2016 @ 06:03 PM 4,472 views
The 10 Most Blatantly Wasteful Defense Items In The Recent $1.8 Trillion Spending Bill
Charles Tiefer
Contributor
I cover government contracting, the Pentagon and Congress.
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US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter shakes hands with Commitee Chairman Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, December 9, 2015.(Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
Here are the 10 most blatantly wasteful defense items in the recent $1.8 trillion spending bill.
Preamble: Senator John McCain knows only too well about defense waste – as a decorated Navy pilot and now Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. During passage of the recent $1.8 billion overall spending bill,, with $572 billion for defense, McCain rose on the Senate floor “to call attention to the triumph of pork barrel parochialism in this year’s Omnibus Appropriation bill.” He cast a lonely but striking “no” vote on the bill. As he described the passage process: “here we stand with a 2000-page omnibus appropriations bill, crafted in secret with no debate, which most of us are seeing for the first time this morning.” It was clear that neither he, nor Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, could control the bill.
What was sneaked through?
1 – 3: Aircraft “wish lists.” The military services have an elaborate mechanism each year, with the connivance of Members of Congress, to overspend on costly weapons. It starts with the Defense Department trying to weigh priorities in putting together the official Presidential budget. But, the services can make their own “wish lists” of weaponry for which the President would not budget – an invitation for contractors to lobby Congress.
(1) Lawmakers included $1.33 billion for 11 additional F-35s above and beyond the budget. The F-35 has an incredible list of cost overruns and unsolved system problems. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found, in effect, that the software, the manufacturing processes, the parts, were all unready for prime time.
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Also, lawmakers included $1.01 billion for (2) seven additional EA-18G Growler electronic aircraft and (3) five more F/A-18 Super Hornets. The prices of these have risen, and the Presidential budget made tradeoffs as to how many to buy. We bought the extra billion dollars anyway.
Enormous non-budgeted “submarine spending fund.” This is a new fund that is meant to keep the super-expensive new nuclear missile submarine outside the normal shipbuilding budget. It’s the “National Sea-Based Deterrence Fund.” Every dollar of the submarine costs, which is a $90 billion – plus program, comes out of the Treasury, just, it will not be weighed against other Navy choices.
Approving the Russian rocket engine monopoly. This was McCain’s bete noir. At present, our military satellite launches all make use of the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing BA -1.39% and Lockheed Martin LMT -0.92%, which use Russian rocket engines. Congress and the Defense Department initially refused to give those companies relief from a new ban on use of the Russian engine after 2019. But, the omnibus spending bill end-ran McCain and set the stage for the companies to stick with Russian engines.
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