Washington, D.C.  – Today’s U.S. Senate vote to end funding for new and unnecessary F-22 fighter jets shows a new willingness among some members of Congress to examine wasteful Pentagon spending, despite the considerable amount of influence defense contractors wield, USAction said Tuesday.

“Common sense wins out,” said Matt Holland, Pentagon Budget Campaign Director for USAction/TrueMajority. “Now we will see if House members get the message. The old ways are dead, and from here on out voters will be scrutinizing the Pentagon budget to scrub wasteful and obsolete weapons systems.

USAction/TrueMajority helped build the nation’s leading coalition educating the public about wasteful defense spending in general and F-22 fighter jets in particular. Members of the coalition include VoteVets, Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, Taxpayers for Common Sense, Common Cause, Physicans for Social Responsibility, Women’s Action for New Directions and other groups.

Holland continued: “For the first time, we have seen a broad-based, bipartisan agreement that we need to stop spending money on programs that don’t protect us and start spending money on things that do. And that includes investments like quality, affordable health care for all, education, clean energy and infrastructure.”

Holland also announced that beginning Wednesday, a radio ad will air in the St. Petersburg, Florida district of a member of Congress who took more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from defense contractors and repeatedly did their bidding in a House defense subcommittee and on the House floor.

The ad features Mike Burns – a former US Air Force pilot and POW who spent years in the same ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison camp as Senator McCain – who calls on Congressman C.W. Bill Young to reject his campaign contributors and vote to end the F-22 Raptor fighter jet.

“This is one of the most worthless and unnecessary programs and we’ve spent 30 years dumping money into it,” Burns says in the ad, “I’m asking Congressman Young to vote against [the F-22]. Be a lion, not a gopher for Lockheed Martin.”

Congressman Young is one of a handful of Representatives who write the FY10 Defense Appropriations bill, which includes the F-22. He is also one of those appropriators that is the focus of a new report by USAction/TrueMajority that profiles the web of connections between powerful weapons manufacturers and House appropriators. The report, Putting the Pork out to Pasture, can be viewed at http://truesecurity.usaction.org/node/2

“Rep. Young received more than $100,000 in contributions from defense contractors in 2008,” Holland said. “So far this year, Young has already asked for $40.1 million in earmarks for those same donors. Vets and voters are asking – and rightly so – who Rep. Young represents: them, or weapons-builders.”

The F-22 was designed to fight the Soviet Union in futuristic dogfights that never occurred. The plane has come under fire recently because it has never been flown in combat or deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan - but each F-22 costs over $350 million to build, and over $44,000 per hour to fly.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and President Obama have led a major push to end the plane’s production – including multiple threats from Obama to veto any military procurement bill that contains additional F-22s.

Burns is a member of Florida Veterans for Common Sense, a group that works to bring responsibility and effectiveness to military decisions.

USAction/TrueMajority’s half a million members have pledged to keep pressure on any member of Congress who continues to spend billions on weapons we do not need while lining their campaign war chests with money from weapons builders.