(Washington, D.C.) – Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) President Tom Schatz today sent a letter to all members of the House of Representatives and the Senate urging them to eliminate the $560 million in pork-barrel earmarks for the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) alternate engine.  The letter reads, in part:

As you move to conference on H.R. 3326, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2010, I urge you to eliminate the $560 million in pork-barrel earmarks for the JSF alternate engine. The Pentagon has proposed canceling the alternate engine project each year since 2006, only to have Congress add more than $1 billion in funding back to subsequent defense appropriations bills.

There is no economic or military justification for spending billions of taxpayer dollars on an alternate engine that will not save money or improve U.S. defense capabilities.  Yesterday, the builders of the alternate engine stopped testing after yet another failure on the test stand. This marks the fourth time in less than 50 total testing hours that the alternate engine has experienced problems. 

While the alternate engine manufacturers continue to waste time and money addressing multiple issues, the main engine has completed over 12,000 test hours and has not experienced a single failure in its 140 hours of flight tests. 

Ashton Carter, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, was quoted on October 5, 2009 as saying that the Pentagon had “looked at and analyzed the potential benefits of a second engine of the Joint Strike Fighter for years…[T]he crux of the analysis is that the additional upfront costs of a second engine are very clear and very real and the possible savings associated with a hypothesized competition in the future are much harder to estimate.”

In May, President Obama highlighted the alternate engine as an example of government waste.  The President stated, “We’re going to save money by eliminating unnecessary defense programs that do nothing to keep us safe — but rather prevent us from spending money on what does keep us safe.  One example is a $465 million program to build an alternate engine for the Joint Strike Fighter.  The Defense Department is already pleased with the engine that it has.  They do not want — and do not plan to use — the alternate version. That’s why the Pentagon stopped requesting this funding two years ago.”

President Obama has threatened to veto legislation that includes funding for the alternate engine.  It is not too late for Congress to act responsibly: eliminate the earmarks for the unnecessary alternate engine and ensure both the financial and military security of our nation.

CCAGW is the lobbying arm of Citizens Against Government Waste, the nation’s largest nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.