Work on the Senate version of the 2010 defense authorization bill continued Thursday, with a retreat by the lawmakers in the face of another Administration veto threat—this one targeting the long-held Congressional desire to keep in play an alternate engine for the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. For several years, the Pentagon has tried to quash the General Electric-Rolls Royce F136 program it began a decade ago to compete with the Pratt & Whitney F135 engine that now powers the F-35, and each time Congress has restored funding for the F136. However, on Thursday, Senators voted unanimously to support an amendment from Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), in whose state P&W builds the F135, to cancel alternate engine funding in the defense policy bill. In a July 23 statement, GE officials state that “the funding battle … is far from over,” noting that House lawmakers and the Senate Armed Services Committee favored the alternate engine. They also state that the F136 development program “is 70 percent complete [and] has been executed on schedule and on cost.” All will have to await House and Senate conference negotiations.
A provision in the fiscal 2025 defense policy bill will require the Defense Department to include the military occupational specialty of service members who die by suicide in its annual report on suicide deaths, though it remains to be seen how much data the department will actually disclose.