One Idea to Find Savings in the Defense Budget
Congress is going to do a better job for the American people to find savings. The debt limit deal signed into law set caps on discretionary spending and is an attempt to control Washington’s insatiable appetite for spending. The American people want Congress to treat their budget just like the American family budget.
The Tea Party was founded because the American people were sick and tired of Congress spending excess and cronyism resulting in the Wall Street bailouts. They want to see Washington bureacrats find some cuts to the federal budget to bring it into balance. No family in America, nor any other nation, is spending more than they earn at a rate even close to our federal government. It has to stop.
The Pentagon budget is level funded for this year and expected to experience cuts next year as part of the deal. There are savings to be found in every department of the federal government and the Pentagon is not exempt. There are specific defense programs that are underperforming and full of inefficiencies that can help balance the budget. The Associated Press reported last week that “Pentagon accounting error provides extra $6.2 billion for Ukraine military aid.” Only in Washington do billion dollar accounting errors happen.
At a time when all programs need to be showing their value, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program has not. Think about the last time your bought a new car and wanted to show it off. One would think that the Air Force would also want to show off the most anticipated stealth fighter jets in recent memory.
But that’s not what the military will be doing with the latest F-35 jets. They will be spending the summer, the fall and possibly the winter in the garage. And not even a garage owned by the Air Force; a garage owned by the contractor who is struggling to make them.
“Starting later this summer, F-35 aircraft coming off the production line with TR-3 hardware will not be accepted until relevant combat capability is validated in accordance with our users’ expectations,” Air Force spokesman Russ Goemaere told Defense News. “The JPO and Lockheed Martin will ensure these aircraft are safely and securely stored until [acceptance] occurs.” It looks like the contractor has delivered the Pentagon, and the American people, a lemon of an aircraft.
This would be like leaving your new car on the dealer lot until they could upgrade the radio and other software. Except this is no laughing matter. It is just the latest in a string of breakdowns plaguing the F-35, the Pentagon’s most expensive weapon system ever.
This time the problem is with the plane’s Technology Refresh 3 (TR-3) effort, which is supposed to give each jet more memory and computer processing power. The military needs to know that this system is up and working before it can upgrade the plane and make it the next generation weapon that the F-35 is supposed to be able to be. This upgrade isn’t some small thing, like moving from Windows 10 to Windows 11. “The stealth jet’s future relevancy in high-end conflicts may even depend on it,” notes the industry publication The Drive.
But such breakdowns are par for the course with the F-35. This jet was poorly planned right from the start.
The F-35 was rolled out too quickly, and that was by design. The goal was to fix glitches on the assembly line, then bring back older jets for upgrades. It is called concurrency, but it ends up meaning that many F-35s are in the shop most of the time. They never seem to catch up.
Even when the plane was declared airworthy, it barely contributed to national defense. Its first use in combat happened in 2018, after the U.S. had been actively engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than 15 years. That mission was to drop bombs (not even smart bombs) on a weapon cache in Afghanistan. A $100 million plane, dropping $40,000 worth of bombs that could have been delivered by drone.
Again, none of these problems are new. “Right now, there are questions about whether the F-35 can fire its cannon or missiles accurately, whether the bugs can be ironed out its software and whether the aircraft can reliably fly without breaking down,” analyst Michael Peck wrote back in 2018. Today, even after billions in new investment, those questions remain unanswered. Unless, as is likely, the answer is that the F-35 simply can’t be fixed no matter how long we wait and how much we spend.
This program is in need of cuts and efficiencies to show the American people that accounting errors and bad aircraft are not wasting billions in taxpayer cash. The Tea Party is alive and well, so Washington big spenders should not take voters for granted when spending their money on waste in the federal budget.
Judson Phillips is the founder of Tea Party Nation, one of the largest tea-party groups in the country.
