House passes defense with largest pay raise for military personnel in decades

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The House approved the National Defense Authorization Act on Thursday with a strong bipartisan majority backing the $886 billion bill and sending it to President Biden’s desk.

The nearly 3,100-page measure, which cleared the Senate a day earlier, includes a 5.2% pay raise for American troops and clears the way for hundreds of billions of dollars in military spending for the next fiscal year, including funding to aid Ukraine and to strengthen U.S. capability in the Pacific.

Pentagon officials praised the development, with Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, a top Defense Department spokesman, saying it “directly invests in America’s national security and military power projection to meet the challenges of the 21st century.”

Several Republicans also had positive things to say, with House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana asserting the legislation “will strengthen our national security against adversaries like China and Russia, and support our service members by providing them with the tools necessary to continue to be the most lethal and effective fighting force in the world” at a moment when “America is facing unprecedented threats across the globe.”

However, the compromise version of NDAA that cleared the House by a vote of 310-118 and the Senate by a vote of 87-13 lacked several proposals put forward by conservative Republicans, many of whom had hoped to use the legislation as a vehicle to roll back what they see as woke initiatives in the Pentagon.

An initial House version had proposed barring the Pentagon from paying the expenses for service members traveling to another state for an abortion. It also wouldn’t have covered hormone treatment and sex change surgeries for transgender service members or their families.

While those proposals were left out of the compromise version that passed Thursday, House Republicans circulated a summary emphasizing how the bill will ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory at service academies and Defense Department schools; slash the Pentagon’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucratic infrastructure; and prohibit the display of any unapproved flags, such as the LGBTQ Pride flag.

Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the chairman of the GOP-led House Armed Services Committee, said the NDAA both supports the military and “guts” President Biden’s “woke” agenda.

The bill brings a $28 billion increase over last year’s Pentagon budget. It also funds more than $2 billion in service chief and combatant commander priorities that were left unfunded by the Biden budget, House Republicans said.

On Ukraine, the legislation extends hotly debated military aid, albeit by providing several hundred million dollars to Kyiv for its war with Russia, rather than the $61.4 billion currently sought by the White House. Republicans insist any larger Ukraine funding package must be accompanied by more funding for U.S.-Mexico border security and a clear roadmap for how the Ukraine-Russia war will end.

The NDAA also creates a special inspector general to oversee all U.S. security assistance to Ukraine and to investigate allegations of waste, fraud, corruption, or a diversion of weapons.

The legislation separately provides a path back to military service for some 8,000 personnel who were discharged after refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine, and includes language to authorize the sale of Virginia-class submarines to Australia through the AUKUS alliance that also includes the United Kingdom.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, Texas Republican, said the measure is critical to pushing back against Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific region. “It is key to have reliable allies like the Australians and British, who have fought side-by-side with us for decades,” he said. 

There was some bipartisan opposition to the bill in the House, with the NDAA vote opposed by 45 Democrats and 73 Republicans.

Some of the most heated dissent came over adding a short-term extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to the bill. It permits warrantless surveillance of foreign nationals but both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have warned that it could be misused by federal officials.

Rep. Chip Roy, Texas Republican, claimed Thursday that 702 resulted in 278,000 improper searches of Americans in 2020 and early 2021. He asserted that Congressional leadership “jammed” the FISA extension into the bill.