MEADS could get last-minute reprieve in Senate bill

The apparent disagreement comes after defense authorizations
in both the House and Senate banned funding MEADS in the 2013 National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA) that passed last year.

{mosads}A House appropriations aide says that the prohibition is the
law in the authorization bill and, therefore, the money in the continuing resolution (CR) will go toward
covering termination costs.

“At this point in time, the enacted authorization language
stands,” the aide said. “So the program is terminated, and those funds are to
be used for termination costs.”

MEADS is a joint missile-defense program with Italy and
Germany that includes an international group of defense contractors led by
Lockheed Martin.

The Pentagon has warned that while the U.S. military is no
longer planning to use the program, pulling out of the contract early would
lead to steep termination fees that would roughly equal the cost to fund the
final year of development.

The program was one of the most contentious fights between
the Pentagon and Congress in last year’s authorization bill, which was not the
first time Congress tried to kill funding for MEADS.

With money included in the CR for MEADS, Sen. Kelly Ayotte
(R-N.H.) has pushed an amendment for the Senate to kill the funding for the
program. She objected to moving forward on the CR Monday night when her amendment was not receiving a vote.

“It makes no sense to spend hundreds of millions more on a
defense program that the Pentagon will never use,” Ayotte said on the Senate
floor. “It’s time to turn off the spigot on this ‘missile to nowhere,’ which
has already cost taxpayers billions and will never see the light of day.”

Durbin, who took over the Defense Appropriations
subpanel this year, argued it was smarter to use the money to finish
development rather than cover termination costs and at least salvage some of
the technology.

“I share the frustration of many of my colleagues that we
have spent so much money and so many years and have reached this point,” Durbin
said on the floor Tuesday. “The cost to finish the development of this program
is almost exactly the same as the cost to unilaterally terminate it, a point
not made by the senator from New Hampshire,” he added.

Durbin said that appropriators made the “best of a bad situation” by providing $380 million “for the department to bring an orderly close to the Medium [Extended] Air Defense System by either completing the development program or paying the termination.”

But the House appropriators argue that the Defense
appropriations bill does not allow for funding of the program.

House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) made that
same point when the House was debating the CR earlier this month. “The prohibition in the NDAA is law, and nothing in this bill or report
overrides or changes that fact,” Rogers said.

— This story was updated at 4:30 p.m.