After hours of debate that culminated in a rebuke of the Trump administration’s efforts to restore Confederate names to military bases, the House Armed Services Committee voted late Tuesday to advance the annual must-pass defense policy bill that endorses a pay bump for service members.
This year’s National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, which supports a 3.8% pay raise for troops starting in January, was approved by the committee in a bipartisan 55-2 vote, sending it to the full House for a vote in the coming weeks. Just Democratic Reps. Ro Khanna and Sara Jacobs, both of California, opposed the bill.
The bipartisan outcome belies nearly 14 hours of partisan debate on amendments that Democrats sought to use as referendums on the Trump administration.
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Democrats offered amendments on a range of issues that have simmered since the beginning of the year, including President Donald Trump’s threats to invade Canada, Greenland and Panama; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the Signal app to discuss military strikes; and Trump’s plan to convert a Qatari luxury jet into Air Force One.
Most of the Democratic amendments, including on those three issues, were voted down along party lines, but the committee debate offered a chance to pin down Republicans on the issues.
And in one major instance, Democrats were successful: Two Republicans, Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska and Derek Schmidt of Kansas, crossed party lines to approve an amendment that would prohibit reversing the work of the commission that renamed Army bases and other Defense Department property that had been named for Confederate military officers.
The bases were renamed after Congress created the naming commission in a previous NDAA and mandated its recommendations be implemented. But Trump, in his first term, opposed the renaming effort and, upon his return to office this year, restored the old base names, though technically with different namesakes who have the same surnames as the Confederate officers.
“This has been hashed out,” said Bacon, who co-sponsored the 2020 amendment to remove the Confederate names. “And what this administration is doing, particularly this secretary of defense, is sticking his finger in the eye of Congress by going back and changing the names to the old names.”
Bacon also sided with Democrats on an amendment to require written justification be sent to Congress if a three- or four-star officer is fired and another stating that it is inappropriate to send operational details on unsecured messaging platforms — a reference to Hegseth’s use of Signal. But that was not enough for the amendments to pass.
Meanwhile, Republicans took some steps to try to codify the Trump administration’s anti-diversity efforts with a handful of amendments that were approved largely along party lines.
The three amendments, all offered by GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, would prohibit any consideration of race or ethnicity in personnel actions; ban affirmative action at service academies by making admissions mostly dependent on a numerical score based largely on standardized test scores; and prohibit any Pentagon offices of diversity, equity, inclusion or accessibility.
The committee also debated at length several amendments on the use of military funding for operations on the U.S.-Mexico border.
“You all just increased DHS’s [the Department of Homeland Security] budget to more than the entire Marine Corps,” said Jacobs, referring to the $165 billion for DHS included in the GOP agenda bill approved earlier this month. “There’s no invasion, there’s no need to send our troops to the border, and there’s certainly no need to take funds away from maintaining military quality-of-life infrastructure to do this.”
A pair of amendments from Jacobs that would have restricted the ability to use barracks and day care maintenance funding for border operations and immigration enforcement were rejected along party lines. She offered her amendments after the Army shifted $1 billion from barracks maintenance funding to cover costs associated with deployments to the border.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., criticized the amendments as “nothing more than a false effort to raise doubt about the tremendous progress the Trump administration has made to secure our border.”
A separate amendment from Rep. Gabe Vasquez, D-N.M., to prohibit the use of any Defense Department funding for a border wall was voted down with Democratic Reps. Jared Golden of Maine and Don Davis of North Carolina opposing it with Republicans.
Another major theme Democrats hammered was politicization of the military, including an amendment from Rep. Pat Ryan, D-N.Y., that would have codified Defense Department policy prohibiting troops from politicking in uniform. The amendment, which failed along party lines, was sparked by a recent Trump speech at Fort Bragg at which troops cheered his attacks on his political opponents and were screened for their political leanings ahead of the event.
One area that found bipartisan agreement was Ukraine. A wide majority of members from both parties supported an amendment from committee ranking member Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., to add $100 million to the bill’s existing $300 million for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative and opposed an amendment from Mace to remove all the Ukraine funding from the bill.
Still, a pair of amendments from Smith to make it harder for Trump to pause aid to Ukraine was rejected along party lines.
The bill now heads to the full House for approval, after which it will need to be reconciled with the Senate’s version of the NDAA before heading to Trump’s desk for his signature. The Senate Armed Services Committee approved its version last week, setting up major differences with the House version that will have to be resolved during negotiations.
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