Kelly Ayotte supports cutting the funding for the F-35 alternative engine

  Back in 2009 the Senate voted 59-38 to cut off funding for the alternative engine for the F-35, falling one vote shy of the 60 votes needed. Last month the newly elected Republican controlled House voted to cut off the funding for this alternative engine meaning that this will most likely head back to the Senate for another vote.

  Here are some facts on the F-35 alternative engine project:

It costs $28 million a month

Since 2007 there has been $1.3 billion in earmarks spent on this duplicate engine

It is estimated that it will take close to $3 billion just to make this engine competitive

There are currently 30 New Hampshire residents working on this project

Both Bush and Obama have called for the termination of this project

The Pentagon doesn’t want the alternative engine, and has no use for it

  After the House voted to cut the funding for this project last month, New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte signed a letter which was sent to her colleagues asking them to follow the lead of the House and cut the funding for this project. Here is what she had to say:

It makes no sense to spend $28 million a month to build an extra engine that the Defense Department’s top leaders say we don’t need. I’ve reached this decision after carefully reviewing the data and hearing from involved stakeholders,” said Ayotte, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“With our country in a fiscal crisis, we have to tighten our belts. Expensive duplicative programs, such as the F-35 alternate engine, represent obvious places to cut.

  Here we have a project to create an alternative engine for the F-35 which the Pentagon does not want and has no use for, costs $28 million a month to keep going, and has created only 30 jobs in New Hampshire in spite of $1 billion in earmarks. Do the math, it certainly seems as if this is a project that is not worth the time and the money which has already been spent on this project.

  Even New Hampshire’s senior Senator, Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, voted in 2009 to stop the funding of a program that the Pentagon itself has tried to stop and said she will again when it comes up for a vote.

  So in light of these facts, who could possibly think that this colossal waste of money is a good idea? Well, I don’t have to look too far because my Representative–Frank Guinta–as well as the second district’s Charlie Bass both voted to continue funding this monstrosity when the vote was taken to defund it last month.

  Frank Guinta called this project a “job creator,” but I would ask him if spending $28 million a month is worth the 30 jobs it has created for the state of New Hampshire? (If these jobs were even created by the project in the first place, the plant which is working on these engines employes over 700 people and nobody has said that these people will lose their jobs if this program is stopped.) To me it seems like nothing more than a giant welfare check being given to the state of New Hampshire from the federal government, and this is exactly the type of behavior that Frank Guinta and Charlie Bass promised to stop–spending a ton of money for very little results.

  Frank Guinta, Charlie Bass, and Kelly Ayotte were all elected by New Hampshire voters because we wanted to reign in the out of control federal spending and these were the candidates who promised to do it. So far Kelly Ayotte is holding up her end of the bargain, but I would like to ask Frank Guinta and Charlie Bass: “what are you thinking?”

  Are they truly serious about ending the out of control spending in Washington? It certainly doesn’t seem like it with the vote they took last month. Here we have an expensive, duplicitous, wasteful project that neither the Pentagon or the president wants–and has no use for–this should be an easy target for elimination in the next budget and yet we have Frank Guinta and Charlie Bass opposed to eliminating it for what must be political gamesmanship.

  As of right now I am willing to give them a second shot; perhaps they saw that the funding for this project was going to be cut off and so they voted to continue funding knowing what the results was going to be. But even so, they are thinking politically first and that is something that I am going to be watching for very closely in the future.