House passes defense policy bill, a rebuke of GOP’s far-right fringe

The House, in a decisive vote Thursday, passed the annual defense authorization bill, delivering a bipartisan rebuke to its most conservative members who had sought to infuse the legislation with a wish list of provisions targeting Pentagon policies on abortion, diversity and LGBTQ+ rights.

The $886 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was approved by a vote of 310-118, having passed the Senate by an overwhelming margin Wednesday night. It proceeds next to the White House, where President Biden is expected to sign the legislation into law.

The sprawling bill – numbering 3,000-plus pages – is a product of months of negotiations between leaders from both political parties who worked to bypass most of the demands made by hard-line House Republicans. It authorizes expanded military partnerships in the Indo-Pacific and Europe – ongoing efforts aimed at countering China and Russia, respectively – and structural improvements at several Defense Department facilities. The legislation includes a 5.2 percent pay raise for military personnel. It also directs the procurement of new weapons and missile-defense systems and outlines a host of other national security imperatives.

Notably, the NDAA also extends the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which the Biden administration has used to help support Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia, through fiscal 2027. However, the bulk of any future Ukraine aid – proposed spending included in an emergency national security funding request from the White House – remains mired in partisan battles and appears unlikely to pass Congress this year, if at all.

Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.), the House Armed Services Committee’s top Democrat, acknowledged that the two sides had “disagreements” as they worked through the final compromise legislation, saying, “There are a lot of things in this bill that I do not like.” But in the end, he added, “You cannot oppose this bill and claim that you support the national security of this country.”

“I really don’t understand where people get the idea that the way the world works is you get absolutely everything you want,” Smith said, taking aim at Republicans complaining about the compromise. “Apparently you don’t like democracy because that’s what democracy is. You compromise and you work with people.”

Over the summer, the typically bipartisan NDAA became ground zero in the nation’s increasingly polarized culture wars, as hard-right Republicans leveraged the GOP’s fragile House majority to attach various provisions aimed at dismantling what they called the military’s “woke” policies on abortion, race and gender-affirming health care.

The Senate subsequently passed a very different NDAA, one largely devoid of such provisions. The dramatic gap between the two chambers had led some congressional staff and defense analysts to wonder whether Congress would be able to reconcile the two bills or if, for the first time in decades, lawmakers would fail to agree upon what is widely considered must-pass legislation.

The compromise bill approved Thursday stripped away nearly all of the hard right’s culture-war provisions – including a measure that would have barred the Defense Department from reimbursing travel costs incurred by service members who travel out of state to obtain an abortion. Several members of the House Freedom Caucus assailed the bill in floor speeches leading up to the vote, characterizing it as a betrayal of conservative values.

“A vote for this bill is a perpetuation of the woke policies undermining our military, bringing down the morale driving down recruiting and now undermining the civil liberties of the American people,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) said.

“With this NDAA conference report you almost feel like a parent who’s sent a child off to summer camp, and they’ve come back a monster,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). “That’s what we’ve done. This bill came back in far worse shape.”

Republican and Democratic leaders of the House Armed Services Committee pushed back against that claim and urged those unhappy with it to embrace the bill’s measures to protect national security.

“I’ll be the first to admit, we didn’t get all the priorities we wanted. But you know what? The Senate is pretty disappointed they didn’t get the priorities they wanted either,” Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.), the committee’s chairman, told his colleagues. He insisted, too, that the bill still contains a number of Republican victories, saying, “It goes a long way toward ending woke policies being forced on our service members by left-wing bureaucrats.”

“This bill is a compromise, but it’s a good compromise,” Rogers said.

A Republican Senate aide said Wednesday that House hard-liners’ insistence on ramming through a deeply conservative version of the NDAA had dealt a blow to Republicans’ leverage in the negotiations despite the GOP’s control of the House.

Republicans had to fight “tooth and nail” even to retain a provision – initially proposed by the Biden administration – allowing the Defense Department to assist the Department of Homeland Security as it confronts a surge of illegal migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, the aide said.

On Thursday, Rogers warned colleagues that a “no” vote would put them on the record as rejecting several Republican victories, along with the NDAA’s expansion of initiatives to address threats posed by China and Russia, to stand with Israel in its war against Hamas, and to improve the livelihoods of rank-and-file service members.

The NDAA prohibits the “display of any unapproved flags, such as the LGBTQ Pride flag, at military installations,” according to a summary of the bill released by House Republicans. It “reiterates” that no Defense Department money is to be spent on drag shows or other events involving drag queens, the summary says, and caps base pay for Defense Department employees whose positions are primarily related to initiatives aimed at fostering diversity, equity and inclusion in the workforce.

The inclusion in the compromise bill of a provision to temporarily reauthorize a controversial, warrantless surveillance program, known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, drew a number of last-minute attempts by conservatives – as well as liberal privacy advocates – to rally opposition to the NDAA. Roy called it “a terrible disservice” to the country.

Critics say Section 702, which allows the government to eavesdrop on foreigners’ electronic communications abroad, intrudes on Americans’ privacy when they happen to be party to such communications. The government argues that allowing the bill to lapse would be severely detrimental to national security. The provision attached to the NDAA would reauthorize 702 for four months, a duration that proponents say will buy Congress time to reform the law.

Section 702 “needs to be reformed; there’s no question about that,” said Smith, the Armed Services Committee’s top Democrat. But without the temporary provision in the NDAA, “it completely goes away on January 1.”

“By God, let’s reform it. But do not let it expire,” implored Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat. “If it expires, Americans and allies will die,” he added.

The House this week was slated to consider separate bills on a long-term reauthorization of Section 702, but officials canceled those votes.

Roy forced a last-ditch effort to adjourn the House before it could vote to approve the defense bill, but the effort failed overwhelmingly.