Alissa Tabirian
NS&D Monitor
11/6/2015
The House of Representatives on Thursday passed its new version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal 2016 with a vote of 370-58 following an agreement between Congress and the White House that cuts $5 billion in previously authorized funding from the Department of Defense budget.
The new NDAA authorizes Congress to appropriate $607 billion to defense spending – a $5 billion reduction from President Barack Obama’s funding request – by cutting funding from various programs and realigning funds from overseas contingency operations accounts to the base budget. The bill continues to authorize $12.5 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and maintains the same level of funding for its national laboratories, totaling $830.8 million.
Among the programs seeing new cuts is the Air Force’s Long-Range Strike Bomber. The long-awaited contract for the stealth bomber, worth an estimated $80 billion, was awarded to Northrop Grumman last week after months of delays. Under the new deal, the program’s funding for the current budget year will be cut by $230 million due to the delayed award.
The NDAA continues to call on the NNSA to develop a plan for governance and management reform for the nuclear security enterprise, to create a stockpile responsiveness program that will ensure technical knowledge transfer between generations of nuclear-weapon designers and engineers, and to address its $3.6 billion deferred maintenance backlog. It also calls for the development of military responses to potential Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty violations by Russia.
Republicans had initially planned to hold an override vote Thursday following Obama’s veto of the last version of the NDAA over objections to the use of overseas contingency operations funding. The new deal is expected to pass the Senate next week. Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said yesterday in a statement, “This bill, and the overwhelming bipartisan majority supporting it, demonstrates that we got it right from the beginning. This time, I hope the President will drop the politics and sign the bill.”
The fiscal 2016 budget impasse seemed to have been cleared when Congress and the White House agreed on a spending deal that increases defense and domestic spending caps for two years and raises the debt limit through March 2017. Obama signed the Bipartisan Budget Agreement into law Monday.
However, Senate Democrats on Thursday blocked for the third time the fiscal 2016 defense appropriations bill as part of a broader effort to stall spending bills until a long-term budget deal is reached. They also last month blocked the House-passed energy and water appropriations bill that funds national defense nuclear weapons activities and other programs at a total of $35.4 billion. Congress must now pass an omnibus appropriations bill to avoid a government shutdown when the current continuing resolution expires on Dec. 11.
