The House Appropriations Committee has chopped $97.4 million dollars from the Department of Defense (DoD) Fiscal Year 2010 (FY10) budget for the GPS III program because of contract delays in the modernization program (OCX) for the Operational Control Segment (OCS).

Presumably, this will affect the purchase schedule for the GPS IIIA program (the first phase of a three-phase GPS III satellite acquisition). However, the congressional language is a little ambiguous due to new formulation of appropriation categories.

This year’s budget request combined OCX and GPS IIIA into a single $815-million line item called “GPS III Space Segment” — broken out as $390 million for OCX and $425 million for GPS IIIA. The GPS III program passed a Preliminary Design Review in May and is on schedule, according to the GPS Wing.

Previously, OCX was a separate line item under the advanced concept development section of the Air Force research, development, test & evaluation (RDT&E) budget. With OCX going into the procurement phase, AF deleted that line item.

So, conceivably the reduction could be aimed at the OCX portion of the
line item, although the appropriations committee’s “Terminations,Reductions & Rescissions” document refers separately to the GPS control segment.

Industrial teams led by Northop Grumman and Raytheon are competing for the OCX contract, and the GPS Wing issued a request for proposals for OCX Phase B in May.

A separate “reduction” of $307 million from the FY09 level in the committee's terminations list isn’t really a cut. As the OCX program moves towards actual implementation, the president’s budget zeroed out that line item and requested a corresponding increase within the section of the AF RDT&E budget dealing with real system purchases.

The President’s FY10 DoD budget request also included $52 million for GPS IIF and OCS development via the Air Force RDT&E program element.

The House legislation, however, omits $59.1 million that Obama had requested for the High-Integrity Global Positioning System (HIGPS, also known as iGPS), a program to demonstrate the capability to use Iridium satellites to enhance current GPS navigation and timing capabilities.

HIGPS, part of the Navy’s budget for Common Picture Advanced Technology RDT&E, received funding last year from the Navy Research Lab (NRL) after Congress cut $41 million from the FY09 line item. The Boeing Company has a $153.5-million contract from NRL for the HIGPS program, which announced earlier this month that it had reached two key milestones.

In other appropriations bills, the House committee has thus far retained a $43.3 million item for the cost of civil requirements for GPS modernization and allocated $92.6 million for the Federal Aviation Administration’s Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS), $4.8 million less than the president requested. Another $7 million for the Local Area Augmentation System and $4.6 million for the inland portion of the Nationwide Differential GPS system is included in FY10 measures still under consideration.