JSF Alternate Engine Faces Crunch Time

CINCINNATI — General Electric and Rolls-Royce are fighting a rear-guard action to save the embattled F136 alternate Joint Strike Fighter engine from being canceled by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates as funding threatens to dry up. But even then the program faces challenges on Capitol Hill. The engine program has sufficient funds in place to continue through mid-December, around the same time an emerging continuing resolution (CR) would expire under a congressional deal reached Dec. 1. The short-term extension to the current CR, which expires Dec. 3, would allow the U.S. government to operate at 2010 funding levels until Dec. 18, but the extension’s impact on the future of the F136 remains almost as unclear as it is now. To protect the F136 from possible termination by Gates, an outspoken opponent of the alternate engine to the F-35’s Pratt & Whitney’s baseline F135 engine, Congress must pass appropriations specifically referring to the program, and make sure the White House cannot veto it. Otherwise, current executive-branch guidance from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) states that automatic apportionment does not apply “if either the House or Senate has reported or passed a bill that provides no funding for an account at the time the CR is enacted.” Without an amendment explicitly including the F136, the latest short-term CR extension still leaves the program’s survival hanging by a thread while Congress mulls further appropriations for all of Fiscal 2011. Options for Congress range from passing another limited CR to passing individual appropriations bills for the year ending Sept. 30, 2011, or some compromise of amalgamated bills for the duration (often referred to as an omnibus bill). Unlike CRs, which freeze and extend current spending and programs, individual and omnibus bills allow Congress to make changes to existing federal plans because they represent new-appropriations lawmaking. Though omnibus bills are more difficult to enact than CRs, the GE-Rolls development team believes an omnibus bill offers a realistic chance of longer-term funding to carry it through to the final stages of development. They point to significant support for the F136 in the House of Representatives, where members in May voted to protect the engine (Aerospace DAILY, June 1). Proponents also believe there is strong support from key senators, like the chairmen of the Senate Armed Services and Appropriations committees, even though neither the defense authorization or appropriations measures moving through that chamber currently includes the F136. Meanwhile, Gates retains the prerogative to issue a stop-work order on the F136 in the coming days as no changes were made under the Dec. 18 CR extension. It is unknown if Gates will choose to exercise this power given that — under similar circumstances in place since October when the initial CR was created as a stopgap funding bill — no such action has occurred. Besides Gates’ pen, politics may well still foil the F136’s survival. The U.S. government is currently operating under a CR that expires Dec. 3. For any part of the U.S. government to keep working after Dec. 3, Congress must pass an appropriations bill that President Barack Obama at least does not veto. Gates and the White House have been strongly warning this year that the president would veto any bill that prolongs the F136. The potential termination comes, ironically, as the development program continues to make significant headway with two additional F136s now running for a total of four active engines. One of these engines was the first short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing production configuration engine (006 build 2), which ran for the first time at the Peebles, Ohio, test site 7 on Nov. 24.