Flying Pork?

I could do an entire blog about government waste, assuming anyone wanted to read one and assuming there aren’t enough blogs on that topic already, but mostly I stay off the subject because my credentials are in management. But business strategy and policy (the subject I am currently teaching) considers all aspects of the business environment, and it is difficult to argue that the squandering of tax dollars and the lavishing those dollars on projects that won’t do a bit of good for anyone except the shareholders of the companies that make them (and the politicians standing for reelection in the districts where those projects take place) is part of that environment. So let’s consider the case of a government “pork barrel” project so absurd that the products being produced are going into mothballs the moment they arrive…

According to the story off the Fox News site, the Air Force has been sending its newly-delivered C-27J “Spartan” light transport aircraft directly to the “boneyard” long-term storage facility at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. So far 16 airplanes of the 21 included in the $567 million contract have been delivered, and the five remaining units are expected to follow within the year or so – whereupon they will probably join the others in Arizona. The Air Force can’t cancel the rest of the order because the airplanes are almost completed and it’s past the cancellation deadline in their contract. But following the drawdown in defense spending as a result of sequestration last spring, the government can’t afford to operate the C-27s, or to assign personnel to keep them ready…

The Fox article, in a rather inflammatory headline, claims that the government is still ordering these aircraft, even though it is sending the delivered units into long-term storage; the text makes clear that they are only fulfilling the terms of a previously-signed contract. It’s actually the later part of the story – which details how these aircraft were demanded by the Senators from the state of Ohio because the C-27 squadrons were going to be based in that state – that really provokes a sense of outrage. Well, that and the fact that the contract was originally going to be for over 40 of these things, costing over $2 billion, during a time when our government can’t even seem to agree on paying for basic health services…

Even worse, in the pork-barrel project sense, is that these aircraft aren’t even being built by an American company. They’re produced by Alenia Aermacchi, an Italian firm based in Rome. Thus, we’re not even getting the multiplier effect from the $567 million; the only possible benefit to our domestic economy would have been the jobs provided by the squadrons operating out of Ohio. I fully agree with keeping our bases open, assuming that we can afford to do so, and I certainly understand how much the local economy in Ohio would have benefitted from this one. I don’t even object to spending $567 million dollars on light transport aircraft that we may or may not actually need; I object to paying $567 million dollars for military aircraft we’re not going to use. Which is to say, paying hundreds of millions of dollars we haven’t got for absolutely nothing…

From a business standpoint, I have to ask if it wouldn’t have been better to just spend a smaller amount of money keeping the relevant airbase open in case we need it later. We could probably find some use for it in the meantime. After all, the C-27J Spartan project isn’t the only barrel of pork whizzing around in the air – and sooner or later they all are going to need somewhere to land…