House Kills F-35 Engine Program
The New York Times reports:
In a sign that some freshman Republicans were willing to cut military spending, the House voted 233-198 on Wednesday to cancel an alternate fighter jet engine that the Bush and Obama administrations had tried to kill for the last five years.
The vote marked another instance in which some of the new legislators, including members of the Tea Party, broke ranks with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a Republican from Ohio, where the engine provided more than 1,000 jobs.
Many of the 87 freshman Republicans in the House had initially been hesitant to trim military spending as part of their drive to reduce the budget deficit.
But after forcing Mr. Boehner and other Republican leaders to propose greater cuts in domestic programs, the freshmen agreed last week to include $16 billion in military cuts in this year’s spending bill.
Wednesday’s vote to cancel the alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter would cut an additional $450 million and save up to $3 billion over the next several years.
The vote was a victory for President Obama and the Defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, who had called the engine wasteful at a time when the Pentagon budget was flattening out. Yet it could also signal trouble for Mr. Gates, who has complained that the Pentagon could face a short-term crisis if the Republicans go ahead with the $16 billion in additional military cuts this year.
In voting to cancel the engine, some of the Republican freshmen formed an unusual alliance with liberal Democrats, who have opposed many of the Republican proposals for cuts in domestic programs.
The Joint Strike Fighter is the military’s most expensive program, and its engines could cost up to $100 billion if the Pentagon and allied nations buy several thousand of the planes.
Pratt & Whitney, a unit of United Technologies, is already building an F-35 engine in Connecticut. But Congress had long insisted on the development of a second engine to provide competition and try to reduce the price on purchases that could eventually reach $100 billion.
The alternate engine was being built by General Electric and Rolls-Royce, which had spent $3 billion on it so far and would have needed perhaps $2 billion to $3 billion more to complete it.
G.E. said it would take the fight to save the alternate engine to the Senate, which has not been as supportive as the House.
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