CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS – DEFENSE
Sept. 26, 2012 – 6:09 a.m.

Navy Seeks Reprogramming to Keep Carriers’ Refueling on Track

Pentagon officials are scrambling to get congressional permission to tap $164.1 million in remaining 2012 personnel dollars to prevent the six-month continuing resolution from halting work on overhauling and refueling two of the Navy’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.

Navy officials have said their biggest concern under the CR (H J Res 117), which funds federal agencies beginning Oct. 1, is that it will delay necessary work on the USS Theodore Roosevelt and USS Abraham Lincoln, causing operational headaches for the military and problems for the shipbuilding industry.

In a Sept. 18 reprogramming request, Pentagon Comptroller Robert F. Hale asked Congress to shift unneeded funding from Navy and Marine Corps fiscal 2012 personnel accounts to pay in advance for the work on the carriers. That would ameliorate the problems created by the CR, which funds most programs at this year’s levels and bans new starts.

The House and Senate Defense Appropriations subcommittees and the House Armed Services Committee have already approved the funding transfer, but the Senate Armed Services Committee is still reviewing it. All four congressional defense committees must approve a reprogramming request.

The Navy had requested $135 million for next year to complete the mid-life refueling of the Theodore Roosevelt by June 2013. Under the CR, however, the service’s funding would come up $68 million short, forcing officials to delay completion of the work and the carrier’s return to the operational fleet.

The reprogramming would redirect that money in fiscal 2012 dollars to the Roosevelt overhaul to make up for the shortfall and keep the carrier on track.

Meanwhile, the CR prohibition on new starts would prevent the Navy from beginning the refueling and overhaul of the Abraham Lincoln in 2013. To keep that effort on schedule, Hale has asked to move $96.1 million to begin funding the work in the waning days of fiscal 2012, which ends Sept. 30.

Failure to provide funding for the Lincoln and authorize its refueling this year would mean the Navy would be unable to meet its “fleet response plan” of having three carriers deployed, two carriers available within 30 days and one carrier available within 90 days, according to the reprogramming. The Navy may also be unable to meet immediate demands from combatant commanders.

Sean J. Stackley, the navy’s assistant secretary in charge of acquisition, told the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on Sept. 11 that a setback in the schedule of maintaining the two carriers would also create “havoc” in the form of delays to other programs at the yard that performs the work, Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, and at its various subcontractors.

Stackley said the carrier work was “at the top of our priority list as an anomaly for the CR,” but did not make the short list of programs that received an exception from the prohibition on new starts and increased funding.

In addition to transferring money to the carriers, the reprogramming request also asks to shift $55 million to the DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer. The money is needed to complete construction on the ship, whose labor and overhead costs have increased.