The Navy Leaguer - 2008 Corporate Membership Directory

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House Bill Cuts DDG 1000 Funding
In Favor Of Restarting Burke Class

Concerned that costs on the Navy’s future destroyer will soon spiral out of control, the House Armed Services Committee has taken steps to put an indefinite hold on the program.

In its version of the fiscal 2009 defense authorization bill, the committee agreed to cut the $2.5 billion requested by the Pentagon for the third DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer.

Instead, lawmakers inserted $400 million into the bill for advanced procurement for either another DDG 1000 or to restart production on the older, but less expensive, DDG 51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.

House Armed Services seapower and expeditionary forces subcommittee Chairman Gene Taylor, D-Miss., already has signaled how he wants the Navy to use that money. During his subcommittee’s markup of the bill, Taylor said the panel “strongly urges” the Navy to direct the money to the DDG 51 program.

The committee’s bill puts the House lawmakers at odds with their counterparts on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who fully funded the Navy’s request for the DDG 1000. The two chambers will have to reconcile the differences in the bills during conference negotiations later this year.

The House was expected to approve the bill in late May. No changes, however, were expected to the DDG 1000 cut approved by the House committee.

The cut prompted an immediate outcry from members of the Maine delegation, where some of the DDG 1000s will be built at General Dynamics’ Bath Iron Works (BIW). Northrop Grumman’s Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., which lies in Taylor’s district, is also building the DDG 1000.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said House efforts to direct money away from the Zumult-class DDG 1000 destroyer program are “ill advised.” Here, she addresses the Maine Republican convention May 3 in Augusta. Collins is running for a third term in office.

Bath and Ingalls also produced the DDG 51.

“The House defense authorization bill is ill advised,” Susan Collins, R-Maine, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee,

said in a statement. “The cuts to the DDG 1000 proposed by the House Armed Services Committee would be devastating to the skilled workers at BIW, detrimental to our national security and is not consis-