It’s Time To Change the Procedure for Government Contracts When we talk about major companies, the aerospace companies are some of the biggest and yet sometimes they seem to be the most inefficient. They are responsible for NASA’s Space Launch System known as SLS. The system is years behind schedule and way over cost. This is nothing new because so many government projects take the same route. I have complained for years about the practices where government contracts where contractors are allowed to keep asking for more money. This practice is certainly become routine and this never should have been. If a company bids on a project and that bid is accepted that is how much the government should pay and not a penny more. If the aerospace company in this case cannot build the SLS for what it promised, we should cancel the contract, make them refund the money, and put the project up for bid again banding the original company from making a bid. The major contractors for the SLS system are Boeing, Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrup Grumman. Boeing seems to be handling building most of the rocket and for some reason the Boeing company has been very troubled lately. They designed built and sold 6800 737 Max planes. The plant where they were manufactured has said they would temporarily stop making them because of all the problems they were experiencing. In the beginning when the problems first started to appear it was thought they were caused by software, but this may not be true. It turns out the company and regulators are looking into everything on the plane including its wiring and its engines. This could be an extremely expensive fix for Boeing with all the planes that might need repair. Once it was obvious what was going on one would have thought it would not have taken this long to discover the problem. Instead articles appeared stating foreign pilots were not trained as well as American pilots and because of this they didn’t know how to correct certain dangerous situations. I for one am tired of shoddy safety procedures by some companies. I’m also tired of seeing our Defense Department overpay for ships, planes, tanks and weapons, some of which are not ready to be deployed. One would think there would be efficient oversight when companies bid on contracts and that oversight would continue until the project was completed. If the project was not completed it should not have been delivered in the state it was in to the military and yet if one looks at the current state of our new aircraft carriers and F-35 planes they will see they were not really ready for deployment. The carrier John F. Kennedy was launched on October 29, 2019. It is the second carrier of the Gerald Ford class. That carrier far exceeded the original cost estimate. The Kennedy was estimated to have cost $11.4 billion to build, but the government accounting office stated it didn’t believe the ship could be built for this price. It said the Navy was counting on labor saving costs which never happened. Things are so bad with the Gerald Ford carrier; they have reached the president’s desk and the president has responded he wants these problems fixed. One of the problems was with the carrier launching system. After launching only a few planes it has to be shut down for a long period of time presumably to cool down. Instead of using steam catapults which are other carriers use, it is using an electronic one. This system was more expensive and far less reliable and yet we had it installed on our carrier before it was operational and the Navy accepted it that way. What is wrong with these people? If you bought a new car would you accept it without one of its essential parts being installed because the dealer promised you somewhere down the road, he would get it for you? I don’t think so, but it seems the government would. The carrier also had propulsion problems, but my understanding is they were corrected. The problems with the Ford are being spun in some part by people involved and they are saying it might have been a good thing it had all these problems since it helps with the building of the more carriers which they thought would be built faster and cheaper because of what was learned. I say problems are never good and no matter how you twist the facts we still have a carrier which has a lot of things wrong with it. When one has a military machine which doesn’t function at 100% it puts people’s lives in jeopardy and aircraft carriers are no exception. The problem is systemic. The entire system of bids for government contracts needs to be re-examined, for we are talking about huge amounts of money and we are also talking about lobbyists and some unethical people who are involved in the process and are not doing what is best for the country, but what is best for themselves. Problems in procurement go way back. When the M-16 rifle was first deployed in the Vietnam war it had jamming problems. There was soldiers who were relying on this rifle to defend themselves and yet there were times when the rifle was useless due to its aluminum parts not functioning correctly. This has been corrected, but one has to wonder how many soldiers died because the rifles were defective? I picked the rifle to talk about because I wanted you to see it is not just large defensive weapons which the government buys that don’t work correctly, it ranges across the whole spectrum of weapons and probably also along the civilian spectrum. It seems whenever the government gets involved things cost a lot more money. It is bad enough things are more expensive, but it is unacceptable when they don’t work after being purchased. Why is it the Air Force would purchase thousands of planes which have hundreds of defects? The F-35 seems to have so much wrong with it, it shouldn’t be one of our main fighters. It’s relatively slow, had tremendous cost overruns, has hundreds of defects and has a problem with it’s oxygen system. Even if it has superior electronics, that is no excuse since they could have been installed on some of the existing planes which seem to have better performance. Some will say the stealth of the plane makes it all worth it, but stealth is steadily being defeated and it is only a matter of time before these planes have absolutely nothing going for them. If the government really wants to reduce the deficit, they should start by cleaning up corruption in contracts and punishing contractors who don’t live up to those contracts.
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