Fast forward to that frugality summit last February. Obama invited questions from members of Congress, and first up was John McCain, who wanted to talk about waste in the Defense Department — like the fact that “your helicopter is now going to cost as much as Air Force One.”  McCain complains about Defense procurement no matter who is president. However, that “your helicopter” did seem a tad personal.  There’s no easier way to get under the president’s skin than to suggest that he’s a wasteful spender. When you’re setting new records for budget deficits on an hourly basis, you don’t want anybody thinking you’re the kind of guy who demands a frilly mode of transportation.  So Obama denounced the new helicopters as “the procurement process gone amok” and vowed reform. In April, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates helpfully followed through by recommending that the contract be terminated.  At this point, we’re in for nearly $4 billion if the contract is shelved, and we already have five helicopters complete and undergoing testing. Under the original plan, Lockheed is now supposed to start building a second-stage super-duper model that would allow the president to do in-air teleconferencing and have lots of other nifty features. Representative Maurice Hinchey, a Democrat of New York and a member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, thinks the administration should just build the other helicopters on the simpler first-stage model. Both he and the manufacturer say this would bring the entire project in at the original budget.  (Hinchey would be the first to admit that he is not totally objective on this matter, since his district includes a Lockheed plant that would lose 800 jobs if the contract is canceled. He gets letters from the children of plant employees with pictures of helicopters making sad faces.)  The Defense Department wants to deep-six the whole plan and put a new contract out in 2011. This is what has always bothered me about wasteful procurement stories. They end with the Pentagon scrapping a troubled contract and starting over from scratch. We don’t wind up actually saving money. We lose our original investment and spend vast new sums on something that’s theoretically going to be better.  The Obama administration completely, totally rejects the theory that the contract is being canceled just because the president doesn’t want to be caught riding in a helicopter that John McCain says is too expensive. But if there’s something deeply wrong with the VH-71s besides their capacity to embarrass the administration, it isn’t immediately apparent. Gates claimed they were “estimated to have only a 5- to 10-year useful life.” But the Federal Aviation Administration rates a commercial version of the helicopters as good for 30 years.  My vote is for the president to take the tougher political route, and the bigger, safer helicopters that are already online. But maybe he could reduce the order, and let other people who have helicopter privileges take their chances with the current fleet or take the train.  And if you can’t bear to think that the president is doing something stupid, blame it on John McCain.  A version of this op-ed appears in print on , on Page A33 of the New York edition with the headline: Trouble On Air Obama. Today's Paper|Subscribe
To stop building presidential helicopters that have already cost taxpayers $3.2 billion in an attempt to avoid appearing wasteful would be exactly that.