SENATOR COLLINS’ QUESTIONS ADMINISTRATION’S PLAN TO ELIMINATE FUNDING FOR LORAN PROGRAM

During a Senate hearing on the President's Fiscal Year 2010 budget, Senator Susan Collins, Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, questioned the proposal to eliminate funding for the Long Range Aids to Navigation, or LORAN, program. The LORAN system employs a chain of land-based, low frequency radio transmitters to send out precisely times and coordinated signals and it serves as a backup to the GPS program. There are currently 24 LORAN stations in the continental United States including one in Caribou, which was established in 1978.

"The federal government has already invested $160 million in modernizing LORAN. Discontinuing the entire program would leave the nation without a backup to the GPS program, wasting millions of dollars already spent on this system," Senator Collins told Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

Senator Collins pointed to a new study recently released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that raises serious concerns regarding the reliability of the GPS network. The report warns that the U.S. government has fallen behind schedule in deploying new satellites to maintain the current GPS service, and that this delay means that GPS service for military operations and civilian uses could be adversely affected.

In 2006, the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and Transportation (DOT) jointly commissioned the Institute for Defense Analyses to conduct an assessment of the continuing need for the current LORAN infrastructure, as well as evaluate eLORAN as a potential next generation position, navigation and timing (PNT) back-up to GPS. The Institute created an Independent Assessment Team (IAT) to conduct this analysis, with a diverse group of senior decision-makers and experts from government, industry, and academia. The IAT reviewed about 40 previous reports and interviewed key stakeholders, industry representatives, and other relevant subject matter experts. In January 2009, the IAT released its report which unanimously concluded that eLORAN should serve as the national PNT back-up system for GPS and that U.S. LORAN infrastructure should be maintained until full eLORAN deployment. Further, the IAT concluded that eLORAN could essentially be deployed for free because the cost of deployment would be offset by the decommissioning cost of existing Loran infrastructure.

"It's ironic that this alarming report by the GAO was released the same day that the administration's budget was released, which calls for the elimination of the LORAN-C, which is the network foundation for eLORAN, the leading proposed backup for GPS," said Senator Collins during the hearing. "An independent assessment team, established by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Transportation, found that eLORAN could be deployed nationwide for approximately the same amount of money that it will cost to decommission the existing LORAN-C infrastructure. For approximately the same amount of money, you could go to the deployment of the eLORAN system and avoid the disruption that could occur because we're proceeding without a backup to GPS."