PORK PLANE’S CUTS RESTORED

So much for those Pentagon bud­get cuts. Back in January, Defense Department chief­tains announced that they were par­ing $30 bil­lion from their ledgers over the next six years. But it became instantly appar­ent that few, if any, of those trims were going to stick — not with all those Congressmen and all those lob­by­ists and all those Pentagon bureau­crats lined up to keep iner­tia rolling. Sure enough, within days, sen­a­tors and gen­er­als were push­ing to restore the cuts to one of deepest-​​gouged pro­grams, Lockheed Martin’s C-​​130J Hercules cargo plane.
Today, they got what they wanted. “Three months after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sub­mit­ted a bud­get to Congress that would have killed the C-​​130J pro­gram, he now believes pur­chases of the Hercules trans­port should con­tinue,” reports Air Force Times. Rumsfeld said end­ing the pro­gram could cost as much as $1.6 bil­lion. So next to noth­ing would be saved by a can­cel­la­tion, he argued.
Now, this wouldn’t be so bad, if the plane worked. But it doesn’t, accord­ing to Tom Christie, who heads the Pentagon’s test­ing and eval­u­a­tion office. He calls the C-​​130J “nei­ther oper­a­tionally effec­tive nor oper­a­tionally suit­able.” Sen. John McCain thinks the Hercules’ is basi­cally a giant hand-​​out to Lockheed. “We’re going to have a C-​​130 in every school­yard in America,” he quipped dur­ing a 1999 pres­i­den­tial debate.
“The C-​​130J proves that pork flies. In the seven years that we, the tax­pay­ers, have owned the planes, they have never been usable in com­bat,” adds Project on Government Oversight exec­u­tive direc­tor Danielle Brian. “This is Washington pol­i­tics at its worst: when the legit­i­mate needs of the troops are ignored by politi­cians push­ing for pork.”

May 11th, 2005 | Money Money Money | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.