The Senate gave the green light to the Pentagon’s mammoth $895 billion annual budget on Wednesday — despite a row over provisions prohibiting the use of those funds to provide transgender surgeries on children, which roiled Democrats.
In an 85-14 vote, the Senate passed the 1,800-page National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which had cleared the House of Representatives last week and now just needs President Biden’s signature.
Every new fiscal year, which starts on Oct. 1, Congress is tasked with passing the NDAA to authorize defense spending and specify expenditures. This year’s bill, which comes two months late, amounts to a roughly 1% uptick over last year’s budget.
It also features a 4.5% pay hike for service members across the board at the start of 2025.
While NDAAs historically garner bipartisan support, Republicans managed to finagle the provision on transgenderism that has peeved Democrats.
Specifically, the NDAA blocks the military’s health care service Tricare from footing the bill for so-called “gender transition” coverage pertaining to service members’ children under the age of 18.
Twenty-one Senate Democrats, led by Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), set to be the sole lesbian in the upper chamber next year, crusaded against the provision.
Baldwin claimed that the transgender policy could have an impact on roughly 6,000 to 7,000 children of service members.
There are some 10,000 transgender youth ages 6 to 22 with parents active in the military, according to an estimate from the Modern Military Association of America.
After the 2024 election, many Democrats privately felt that Republicans pummeled them successfully on transgender issues, sparking divisions within the party about how to respond.
Beyond the transgender provisions, the NDAA aimed to improve conditions for service members, including a 14.5% bump for junior troops in a bid to boost recruitment efforts.
An amendment to the bill penned by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) would also authorize the DOD to safeguard the border from drones — a threat on many Americans’ minds with the recent incursion of unidentified aircraft in New Jersey and New York, the latter of which shares a border with Canada.
“Murderous drug cartels and foreign adversaries have taken advantage of the chaos of the last administration to fly drones unchecked into American airspace,” Ernst said in a statement.
“Border security is national security, and Americans deserve real measures to protect them against a growing threat.”
The measure further enables the use of the National Guard to support efforts to curb the flow of illegal immigrants across the US-Mexico border.
Another provision in the NDAA is a hiring freeze on roles related to diversity, equity and inclusion until the Department of Defense is able to finish off an investigation of DEI programs.
The NDAA also cracks down on business contracts between the Pentagon and contractors who use advertising firms that target conservative-leaning outlets.
GOP lawmakers had also battled for other policies that ultimately didn’t get into the bill, including a ban on mask mandates for preventing viral infections, a broader ban on transgender coverage for adults and a prohibition on the Pentagon reimbursing travel costs for women to obtain abortions.
Meanwhile, Democrats pursued an expansion of in vitro fertilization coverage for members. At the moment, the Pentagon only covers IVF for service members with infertility issues tied to injuries during their service.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has claimed that the NDAA amounted to some $31 billion in savings by taking aim at “inefficient programs, obsolete weapons, and bloated Pentagon bureaucracy.”
Congress is facing a Friday deadline to prevent a lapse in government funding and avert a shutdown, as it still has yet to properly fund the government for the current fiscal year, which started over two months ago.
