Senate clears way for final vote on ‘25 NDAA; House expects approps bill this week

The Senate on Monday easily cleared a procedural hurdle to tee up a vote on an annual defense policy bill while the House prepared for a vote on another stopgap budget.

The Senate voted 83 to 12 to end debate on a version of the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that drew widespread, though not unified, Democratic opposition in the House last week over restrictions on allowable medical treatments for servicemember children who identify as transgender.

The strongly bipartisan Senate vote to invoke what is known as cloture clears the way for the upper chamber to vote on final passage of the bill by the end of the week. 

President Joe Biden (D) had not said as of Monday evening whether he would veto the bill. Last week, 124 members of his own party, including the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, opposed the bill. On the other hand, 81 Democrats in the House voted for it.

Meanwhile, according to the website for Majority Leader, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-Calif.), the House expected sometime after Tuesday to vote on another federal spending bill to prevent a partial government shutdown before Friday, when the current stopgap spending bill expires. The bills hold agencies to their 2024 budgets.

Under the current stopgap, or continuing resolution, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is held to the annual equivalent of about $24.1 billion. The White House requested about $25 billion for NNSA in 2025, which is about what the NDAA now moving through the Senate would authorize.

The request and the NDAA, however, are lower than what either House or Senate appropriators proposed this summer in unreconciled spending bills: about a half-billion dollars than the House’s recommendation and roughly a quarter-billion dollars lower than what Senate appropriators approved.

Meanwhile, the NDAA would cap spending on defense environmental cleanup, the largest tranche of nuclear-weapons-cleanup programs in DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, at just under the requested level of $3 billion for 2025. Under the current continuing resolution, the office has the equivalent of an $8.5 billion budget, more than either House or Senate appropriators proposed this summer.