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$895.2 billion compromise NDAA released, sliding under Fiscal Responsibility Act cap levels [1]

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Date: 2024-12-08

RNDF 2024 — The House and Senate today released their compromise version of the National Defense Authorization Act, with a $895.2 billion topline.

The newly revealed topline means the NDAA will come in under the congressionally mandated budget caps imposed by the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA), despite a push in the Senate to go over that number.

The bill authorizes $883.7 billion for fiscal year 2025, including $849.9 billion for Department of Defense programs. It also approves $33.3 billion for national security programs in the Department of Energy and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and $512.4 million for defense-related activities. Other funds outside the jurisdiction of the NDAA boost defense funding to the $895.2 billion topline.

The deal resolves one major question looming over the bill — whether congressional authorizers would approve a significant uptick in defense spending — but introduced a new potential headwind to the NDAA’s ultimate passage in the form of provisions that would prohibit coverage of gender-affirming care for transgender children of servicemembers.

In an interview with Breaking Defense, Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said that he had not yet decided whether he would support the bill due to the language.

“I think that undermined the bipartisan tradition of the bill,” the Washington Democrat said on the sidelines of the Reagan National Defense Forum this afternoon.

“I think there is some controversy about what treatments minors should receive for gender dysphoria,” he said. “I said, look, if you want to ask DoD doctors and the DoD medical establishment to take a look at those concerns and address them, I can absolutely be in favor of that. But if you want to play the role of doctor and ban the care for everybody when it is not debatable that there are some minors with gender dysphoria who benefit from the treatments that this bill would ban — so you are denying health care to the children of service members, that they need, to serve a partisan agenda — I think that’s extraordinarily problematic.”

Smith added that it is “difficult to say” whether Democrats will support this version of the NDAA, which typically receives overwhelming bipartisan support, adding that House GOP leaders hope to increase the bill’s chance of survival by adopting a rule that would allow it to move forward in a simple majority vote.

“I am not going to judge a Democrat who votes one way or the other on this. There’s a lot of good stuff in the bill,” he said. “So I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, you have to vote for this or you have to vote against it.’ I’ll make my own personal decision, and other members will as well.”

The earlier version of the bill approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee included a total of $878.4 billion for the Defense Department and $33.4 billion for defense-related activities in the Department of Energy. When combined with an estimated $11.5 billion in non-NDAA defense activities, the total national defense topline sought by the SASC was $923.3 billion — blowing past the $895.2 billion defense spending cap imposed by the FRA by a significant margin that staffers previously put in the range of $25 billion.

In contrast, the House version put forth $883.7 billion, including $849.8 billion for the Pentagon, in numbers designed to squeeze under the FRA topline.

Of course, the NDAA is the defense policy bill, not a funding bill. The ultimate topline will be decided by appropriators, and it is unclear when that will come. The expectation among attendees at this year’s Reagan National Defense Forum is that the continuing resolution funding the government, which expires on Dec. 20, will be extended to March.

Updated 12/7/24 at 8:57 pm ET with Smith’s comments.

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[1] Url: https://breakingdefense.com/2024/12/895-2-billion-compromise-ndaa-released-sliding-under-fiscal-responsibility-act-cap-levels/

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