WASHINGTON — The Senate passed a defense bill Wednesday that authorizes significant pay raises for junior enlisted service members, aims to counter China’s growing power and boosts overall military spending to $895 billion while also stripping coverage of transgender medical treatments for children of military members.
The annual defense authorization bill usually gains strong bipartisan support and has not failed to pass Congress in nearly six decades, but the Pentagon policy measure in recent years has become a battleground for cultural issues. Republicans this year sought to tack on to the legislation priorities for social conservatives, contributing to a months-long negotiation over the bill and a falloff in support from Democrats.
Still, the bill passed comfortably 85-14, sending it to President Joe Biden. Eleven senators who caucus with Democrats, as well as three Republicans, voted against the legislation.
Alabama’s angle
Alabama Republican Sens. Tommy Tuberville and Katie Britt each voted in favor of the bill and touted its positives for Alabama’s military bases and industries.
Tuberville, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee that works on the National Defense Authorization Act, said the bill secures important funding for installations and projects, including:
- $300 million for Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Fort Novosel in the Wiregrass and the Anniston Army Depot;
- $725 million for Alabama-based missile defense systems;
- Increased funding to enhance a submarine industrial base, as the Port of Mobile is vying for a submarine-building shipyard.
Tuberville also touted conservative policy inclusions in the bill, including a ban on military funded gender transition treatments and defunding diversity, equity and inclusion programs. He said it’s only a start to what Republicans will pursue when President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
“Alabama is authorized more than $1 billion in critical funding to support our bases, troops, facilities, and the defense industrial base,” Tuberville said in a statement. “I look forward to next year’s negotiations when both chambers of Congress and the Executive branch can fully work together to restore peace through strength under President Trump.”
Britt said she worked to secure Alabama-related provisions, including assessing basing and training requirements for the Future Tactical Unmanned Aircraft System that will strengthen the mission at Fort Novosel. She also pointed to parts of the bill that aim to improve the quality of life for service members, including in the area of mental health.
“Addressing America’s mental health crisis extends to our Armed Forces, which is why I was committed to finding ways to support the mental health of our servicemembers and their families in this Defense Bill,” Britt said.
The NDAA passed the bill last week, with Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers, R-Saks, taking a lead role in crafting it from his position as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. He service member pay has failed to remain competitive with the private sector, forcing many military families to rely on food banks and government assistance programs to put food on the table. The bill also provides significant new resources for child care and housing.
“No service member should have to live in squalid conditions and no military family should have to rely on food stamps to feed their children, but that’s exactly what many of our service members are experiencing, especially the junior enlisted,” Rogers said. “This bill goes a long way to fixing that.”
The broader picture
The bill “isn’t perfect, but it still includes some very good things that Democrats fought for,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., in a floor speech. “It has strong provisions to stand up against the Chinese Communist Party here on a national security basis.”
In the House, a majority of Democrats voted against the bill last week after House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted on adding the provision to ban the military health system from providing transgender medical care for children. The legislation easily passed by a vote of 281-140.
Senate Republican leaders argued that its 1% increase for defense spending was not enough, especially at a time of global unrest and challenges to American dominance. Senate Republicans had argued for a generational boost to defense spending this year, but are planning another push for more defense funding once they control the White House and Congress next year.
“We are currently experiencing the most dangerous national security moments since World War II,” said Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who will chair the Senate Armed Services Committee next year. He has pushed for larger boosts to defense funding that would break spending caps that were agreed to in the bipartisan deal to suspend the nation’s debt ceiling last year.
The annual defense authorization bill directs key Pentagon policy, but it would still need to be backed up with an appropriations package.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said in a floor speech this week that without the topline increase “major bill provisions like a pay raise for enlisted servicemembers will come at the expense of investments in the critical weapons systems and munitions that deter conflict and keep them safe.”
The legislation provides for a 14.5% pay raise for junior enlisted service members and a 4.5% increase for others. Lawmakers said those were key to improving the quality of life of service members at a time when many military families rely on food banks and other government assistance programs to make ends meet.
“It includes major quality of life improvements, enhancing things like childcare, housing, medical services, employment support for military spouses and much more,” said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Tucked into the defense bill was also a provision to eliminate a roughly $100-a-month cut in unemployment and sickness benefits for the some 200,000 rail workers nationwide. The benefits are entirely paid for through workers’ wages, but got caught up in previous budget cuts. In a rare move, the railroads joined with their unions to lobby for the change.
The legislation also directs resources toward a more confrontational approach to China, including establishing a fund that could be used to send military resources to Taiwan in much the same way that the U.S. has backed Ukraine. It also invests in new military technologies, including artificial intelligence, and bolsters the U.S. production of ammunition.
The U.S. has also moved in recent years to ban the military from purchasing Chinese products, and the defense bill extended that with prohibitions on Chinese goods from garlic in military commissaries to drone technology.
The Chinese foreign ministry responded to that move last week by calling the bans laughable.
“I don’t think it could ever occur to garlic that it would pose a ‘major threat’ to the U.S.,” said Mao Ning, a ministry spokeswoman. “From drones to cranes, from refrigerators to garlic, more and more Chinese-made products have been accused by the US of ‘posing national security risks’. But has the US shown any reliable evidence or rationale to back up those accusations?”
But in Congress, Republican and Democratic lawmakers have been mostly united in their stance that China is a rising threat. Instead, it was culture war issues that divided lawmakers on the bill, which took months to negotiate.
The Republican-controlled House had passed a version of the bill in June that would have banned the Defense Department’s policy of reimbursing costs for service members who travel to another state for an abortion, ended gender affirming care for transgender troops and weeded out diversity initiatives in the military.
Most of those provisions did not make it into the final package, though Republicans are expecting Trump to make sweeping changes to Pentagon policy when he enters office in January.
The bill also still prohibits funding for teaching critical race theory in the military and prohibits TRICARE health plans from covering gender dysphoria treatment for children under 18 if that treatment could result in “sterilization.”
Mike Zamore, the director of policy and government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union, urged Biden to veto the bill, saying it was “forcing thousands of active-duty service members to choose between their careers in the military and the future of their transgender children.”
In a floor speech, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., said she has always voted for the NDAA, but would not do so this year. She said that the policy change for transgender children would affect between 6,000 and 7,000 families, according to estimates her office has received.
“The NDAA has embodied the idea that there is more that brings us together than separates us, that our service members and national defense are not to be politicized. That we put our country over a party when the chips are on the table,” she said. “Unfortunately, this year that was ignored — all to gut the rights of our service members to get the health care they need for their children.”
Alabama Daily News Publisher Todd Stacy contributed the Alabama-focused section of this article.