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WASHINGTON – Spending millions to build an alternative engine for the jet plane the military wants to eventually make up most of its fleet of fighter planes: prudent move or wasteful spending?
Your answer will depend on the logic you find compelling and possibly on where you live. And both “yes” and “no” are defensible conclusions.
Years ago Congress and the Defense Department set up a competition for contractors to develop the best engine for the F-35 joint force striker plane. The Pentagon plans to eventually have most of the branches use the same kind of plane, and all will rely on the same engine.
Pratt & Whitney and GE-Rolls-Royce each developed an engine, and Pratt & Whitney won, the Pentagon said. But Congress has continued to fund work on the GE-Rolls-Royce alternative engine.
This year, President Obama said enough was enough. Backed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Obama said he wanted no money for the alternative engine in the 2010 Pentagon’s budget.
Are Obama and Gates right? Or is Sen. Evan Bayh, who argued passionately to include $560 million in next year’s budget for the GE-Rolls-Royce engine?
Argument 1: The alternative engine is a waste of tax money.
Besides that, allocating $560 million in tax money to continue work next year on the GE-Rolls-Royce engine just depletes the resources available for F-35s. The more engines, the fewer fighter jets.
National security is at risk.
Argument 2: It is foolhardy to rely on just one company – Pratt & Whitney – to build the engines for the F-35 jet.
What if something goes wrong? What if the engine turns out to have a fatal flaw? Or there’s a strike at Pratt & Whitney’s factories? Or a terrorist attack at them?
In any of those unlikely but not utterly farfetched scenarios, what options will the Air Force, Navy and Marines have? They expect to buy about 2,400 F-35s. It’s not like you can traipse into the neighborhood jet engine retail store buy off the shelf.
National security is at risk.
So how to choose between those two logical and reasonable arguments?
You might think Bayh would be inclined to come down on the side of fiscal prudence. After all, he voted against several of the spending bills for next year’s federal programs, including departments and agencies that deal in agriculture, homeland security, transportation, housing, education, labor and environment.
And he’s spoken sharply against earmarks – the special projects lawmakers insert into spending bills – and said he would seek none this year.
Bayh might well have opposed the alternative engine had he represented Mississippi or Idaho. But the fact that Rolls-Royce has a major installation in Indiana clearly was a factor in Bayh’s advocacy.
Ditto Sen. Richard Lugar. He also voted for the duplicate engine project, and chances are parochial interests factored into his decision.
It’s difficult to argue that they were wrong. The logic of having a backup producer can’t be brushed aside. And there are hundreds of Rolls-Royce jobs that would evaporate if Washington ash-canned the alternative engine.
Yet if we Hoosiers didn’t have those hundreds of Rolls-Royce jobs to consider, we might look at this differently.
A cynic might call it hypocrisy or selling out for Bayh to forswear making special project requests yet go to bat for a project that many have described as wasteful.
A more reasonable person might point out that the alternative engine isn’t a slam-dunk pork-barrel project and that fair-minded people can disagree about its value.
But two things are definite: This will be a very difficult issue for Bayh’s eventual Republican opponent to turn into a campaign issue next year. And it points out how vacuous it is when people say they will rein in federal spending by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse.”
