The House Armed Services Committee rejected an amendment Wednesday to make complex software updates for the F-35 fighter its own separate acquisition program, which would allow for better oversight.
Rep. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., who introduced the amendment, said that the $3 billion software modernization should be pulled out of the broader F-35 acquisition program to give Congress more authority to exercise oversight and require reporting.
“This amendment is not an attempt to hinder F-35 procurement in any fashion … in fact, I agree that this country needs a fifth generation fighter,” Duckworth said in the House Armed Services Committee mark up of the fiscal 2017 defense policy bill. “I feel Congress must balance this with our need to address rigorous oversight and be good stewards of taxpayer dollars.”
The amendment failed on a 20-41 vote, the first recorded vote of the marathon mark up expected to run until early Thursday morning.
The F-35, which is built by Lockheed Martin, has faced years of cost overruns and delays, problems that Duckworth said shouldn’t spill over into the software updates that will be part of the Block 4 purchase of the aircraft. She argued that the cost alone would classify it as a stand-alone acquisition program, according to precedent.
But Rep. Michael Turner, R-Ohio, argued that separating the modernization efforts would hurt the F-35 program as a whole by creating more bureaucracy and delaying new planes from getting into the fleet by up to a year.
“This isn’t the solution,” he said.
The Pentagon expressed similar concerns at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday.
The Government Accountability Office, however, also recommended at the hearing that the program be treated as its own separate major defense acquisition program, an effort for which Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, expressed support.
