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July 6, 2007

Kennedy pushes $100m item for Mass.

Some say defense project is unnecessary

By Bryan Bender

Boston Globe

WASHINGTON -- For the second year in a row the Pentagon has insisted that it doesn't need another engine for its next-generation fighter jet. And again, Senator Edward M. Kennedy and other powerful lawmakers are forcing it to build one anyway.

Tucked in the annual defense bill moving through Congress is $480 million to develop a spare engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter even though the Air Force concluded in 2005 that it was redundant -- and two independent review boards agreed.

That didn't trump pork-barrel politics.

General Electric Aircraft Engines in Lynn is designing the spare engine and says the project will bring jobs to the Bay State. That led Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat and member of the Armed Services Committee, to keep the project alive.

Last month, Kennedy personally "earmarked" $100 million for the engine -- more than 20 percent of its cost -- during committee deliberations over the 2008 defense authorization bill. Other lawmakers whose home states could also benefit inserted the rest of the funding.

Kennedy, a 44-year Senate veteran, has a long history of steering federal dollars to Massachusetts. Some of the earmarks have come under scrutiny, including money for infrastructure projects in Hyannis Port, where the Kennedy family has a summer home, and the problem-plagued, billion-dollar Big Dig tunnel project .

But the engine earmark is especially striking since Kennedy has advocated for controlling defense spending. Delivering $480 million for an engine that may never fly is far more than any of Kennedy's previous defense-related earmarks and is among his most expensive, records show.

In 2003, for example, Kennedy boasted in a press release that he had secured $216 million for military projects in Massachusetts, for more than 20 separate projects.

Some of the military's biggest boosters note that the GE engine is suited only for the F-35, saddling the Air Force with a big expense that has little utility and draining money from other military priorities, such as armored vehicles for troops in Iraq or body armor for airmen and women serving in harm's way.

The program "is on a nearly half-billion dollar life support system," according to a recent posting on DefenseTech.org, a widely read military industry website.

Kennedy is not alone in adding pork-barrel spending projects to congressional legislation this year. Senate Armed Services Committee members alone added at least 309 extra projects worth $5.6 billion, according to a database by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group.

"This project will probably provide hundreds of jobs, but that is not the point," added David Williams , vice president for policy at Citizens Against Government Waste, which documents earmarks in its annual Pig Book. "Did the Air Force want it? Was it a budget priority? Therein lies our concerns."

Kennedy, however, insisted in a statement that the engine program "has the potential to create hundreds of jobs in Massachusetts" and reinforces the state's leadership in the defense industry.

"Competition has been proven to increase performance and reduce cost," said Kennedy in a separate letter urging the Senate defense appropriations panel to include the money in a final military spending package.

The Pentagon asked for the alternate engine in 1995 to foster cost-saving competition between jet engine manufacturers. Pratt & Whitney, a division of Connecticut-based United Technologies, is building the primary engine while Ohio-based GE and its partner, Rolls Royce's Indiana division, will build the alternate engine.

Two years ago, after spending at least $2.5 billion, the Air Force decided that it could not justify the parallel engine project, which could top $9 billion. The Air Force has not budgeted for it since then, and at least two recent assessments -- one by the Pentagon's Cost Analysis Improvement Group, another from the Institute for Defense Analyses, a Pentagon consultant -- concurred.

"If you have to write a program explicitly into a piece of legislation it has generally failed all the other cost-benefit analyses and otherwise would not have been approved," said Ronald D. Utt , a congressional expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank.

But a study by the Government Accounta bility Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded that competing F-35 engines could drive down costs and give the Air Force an option if the primary engine is inadequate.

Nevertheless, DefenseTech.org has asserted that "there has been no good case made to justify" the conclusion that the alternate engine will help save money.

GE spokesman Rich Gorham said Kennedy's move could help the company "potentially be a big player here in Lynn." Keeping the project alive, he said, "is very important for our business, without question."

(Campaign finance records show that Kennedy has received more than $5,000 in campaign donations from General Electric executives, according to the Center for Responsive Politics).

Still, one industry insider believes Kennedy's efforts could ultimately backfire because General Electric has more than one US plant, and it hasn't committed to building the engine in Massachusetts.

"Senator Kennedy seems to be supporting the alternate engine on the belief that it might be built at the Lynn plant," said Loren Thompson , a defense consultant at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. "But GE has made no such commitment. . . . The entire pattern of GE industrial investment over the past 50 years had been to flee the Northeast. So if legislators want to see the alternate engine built in Lynn, they had better get a promise now from GE to do so."

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