The Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee’s spending bill boosts shipbuilding by $2.1 billion in fiscal 2017, including about $1 billion to speed up procurement of a new ice breaker.
The bill, approved by the subcommittee on Tuesday morning, includes $20.5 billion for shipbuilding, an increase of $2.1 billion to cover three ships above the president’s request, according to a subcommittee release.
In total, the bill would pay for the construction of 10 new ships: two Virginia-class submarines, three destroyers, three littoral combat ships, one amphibious assault ship and the polar ice breaker.
Virginia-class subs are built by General Dynamics Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding. Lockheed Martin and Austal USA make littorial combat ships, and Huntington Ingalls builds America-class amphibious assault ships.
The full Senate Appropriations Committee will consider the defense subcommittee’s bill on Thursday.
The bill offsets the boost in shipbuilding, as well as investments in other unfunded service priorities to increase readiness, through 450 budget cuts that resulted in $15.1 billion in savings.
About $3.8 billion in prior year funds that are no longer needed and $1.6 billion in fuel costs coming in lower than expected contributed to the savings.
The bill also includes about $2.5 billion above the president’s request for aircraft procurement, including $979 million for 12 additional Boeing F/A-18s for the Navy, $507 million for four more Lockheed Martin F-35s — two for the Navy and two for the Marines — and $187 million for 28 Airbus Lakota helicopters for the Army.
The bill also removes prohibitions on using Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines for Air Force space launches, according to a summary. The bill would require any competitive launch capability to be available to any U.S. launch provider “regardless of the country of origin of the launch vehicle rocket engine.”
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has pushed to limit the number of RD-180s the Air Force can use to end its reliance on Russia as soon as possible.
