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The Pentagon has barred the release of a government watchdog report on the F-35 fighter plane program, the Defense Department’s (DOD) most costly weapon system that has been riddled with performance issues and increasing costs.
The report from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is mandated by Congress and issued annually, was reviewed by the Pentagon and marked as having “Controlled Unclassified Information with no current plan to be released to the public,” a GAO spokesperson told The Hill on Wednesday.
The public title of the unreleased report is “F-35 JOINT STRIKE FIGHTER: Update on Production and Modernization Efforts.”
The Pentagon declined to comment.
Bloomberg News first reported on the blocked report.
GAO’s reports shed light on the costly F-35 program that has faced readiness challenges. The F-35 Lightning II, which is produced by Lockheed Martin, is a fifth-generation single-engine, supersonic stealth fighter jet that is equipped with advanced sensors, electronic warfare and other features to fulfill multirole demands.
But the program has faced criticism for late deliveries of engines, software updates, cost overruns and a lack of readiness. GAO report from last month said that only one in four of the F-35s is fully mission-capable.
“The strategy aims to address challenges we’ve identified, such as a lack of spare parts. However, we found that multiple issues could threaten its success—such as constrained industry capacity to meet increasing demand for parts,” GAO wrote in the report.
“DOD also paid its contractor hundreds of millions in incentives since 2020 to improve F-35 readiness, but these incentives haven’t been effective,” the watchdog said.
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