<p>There was a story last week about the unaccountable accounting on the Air Force's Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program.</p>
<p>This is a program in which the government gave Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the manufacturers of the Delta, and Atlas and Titan launch vehicles, respectively, millions of dollars in funding to help them both improve the performance and reliability of the systems, and to reduce their cost. The catch is that these are ostensibly commercial systems, so this is in effect a taxpayer subsidy of what should be in theory private enterprise.</p>