F-110 Engines To Turkey: Congress Has 15 Days To Say No
The Trump administration notified Congress on June 24 that it intends to sell more than $700 million worth of GE Aerospace F-110 engines to Turkey, enough to power roughly 80 units for Ankara’s indigenous KAAN fighter program. Congress now has a narrow, fifteen-day statutory window to introduce a joint resolution of disapproval. That window is closing, and it should be used.
The case against the sale is not abstract. Turkey still operates the Russian-made S-400 air defense system it purchased in 2019 — the same purchase that got Ankara expelled from the F-35 program in the first place and triggered CAATSA sanctions that remain in effect today. No credible reporting shows Turkey has divested the system. Lawmakers across both parties have made the same point for years: operating S-400 radar alongside American combat aircraft creates a real intelligence-gathering opportunity for Moscow. That’s not a talking point invented for this fight — it’s the reason Turkey was removed from the F-35 program to begin with, and nothing about that underlying risk has changed.
This isn’t only about engines. The F-110 sale is smaller and more limited than the F-35 question, but it sits on the same track. Turkey’s stated goal is readmission to the F-35 program, and the engine package is being read in Ankara — and by skeptics in Washington — as a diplomatic down payment ahead of the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7–8. A bipartisan letter led by Reps. Mike Lawler and Brad Sherman, co-signed by members from both parties, has already gone to the White House warning against any move to sell F-35s to Turkey. Reps. Chris Pappas, Dina Titus, Nicole Malliotakis, and Gus Bilirakis have separately pressed the State and Defense Departments on the same grounds. The concern isn’t partisan. It’s structural: Turkey under Erdoğan has spent the years since 2019 deepening ties with Moscow and Tehran, maintaining its occupation posture in northern Cyprus, and escalating rhetoric against Greece and Israel — hardly the profile of a partner that has earned expanded access to sensitive American defense technology.
The process complaint matters too. Rep. Gregory Meeks, ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has objected that the administration is bypassing the normal informal congressional review that precedes a sale of this size — and has pointedly noted that the engines “will not be delivered for years,” undercutting any claim of urgency. If there’s no operational urgency, there’s no reason to short-circuit oversight that exists precisely to prevent decisions like this from being made on the eve of a summit for atmospherics rather than security logic.
What should happen now:
- The House should move on Rep. Titus’s threatened joint resolution of disapproval before the fifteen-day window lapses.
- Any resolution should be paired with the Titus-led letter to Speaker Scalise and Leader Jeffries invoking CAATSA Section 216(c)(3), so that any future attempt to readmit Turkey to the F-35 program without the statutorily required certification is blocked at the same time.
- Members on both sides of the aisle who have already gone on record — Lawler, Sherman, Pappas, Titus, Malliotakis, Bilirakis, Gottheimer, and others — should keep public pressure on leadership rather than letting the window close quietly during recess-adjacent scheduling.
None of this requires hostility toward Turkey as a NATO ally of seventy-plus years. It requires treating the S-400 issue as what it has always been: a live security problem, not a grievance to be smoothed over for one summit. Congress wrote the CAATSA and NDAA restrictions into law for a reason. The administration doesn’t get to waive that reasoning by making a $700 million goodwill gesture look small enough to slip past scrutiny.