‘Negotiated’ Defense Bill Lets Leftists Keep Using The Military To Push Abortion, DEI, And Trans Agendas
House and Senate negotiators released the text of a “negotiated” defense spending bill on Wednesday night that predictably allows leftists’ Marxist takeover of the U.S. military to go unchallenged.
Deliberated on behind closed doors by House and Senate leaders this week, the finalized draft of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2024 — which clocks in at more than 3,000 pages — permits Democrat-backed ideologies and policies remaking America’s armed forces to remain in place for at least another year. Among the most notable is the allowance of the Pentagon’s unlawful and immoral abortion policy to continue.
Earlier this year, the Defense Department (DOD) began using U.S. taxpayer dollars to pay for service members’ travel expenses to receive abortions. The enactment of this illegal guidance prompted Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville to launch a protest, in which he used his position on the Senate Armed Services Committee to slow-walk the confirmation of President Biden’s military nominees. Tuberville was forced to abandon most of his protest earlier this week after several of his GOP colleagues threatened to side with Democrats in changing Senate rules and allowing the upper chamber to sidestep his holds.
With Tuberville’s protest mostly finished, the 2024 NDAA remained the only avenue available to congressional Republicans to halt the Pentagon’s unlawful policy. While the original House version included a provision revoking the guidance, the “negotiated” 2024 NDAA draft released this week does not, meaning the DOD will continue using taxpayer money to subsidize service members’ abortion travel for at least another year.
Another conservative-backed policy axed from the proposed 2024 NDAA is language prohibiting the use of TRICARE funds to subsidize trans surgeries and wrong-sex hormones for service members and their families. (TRICARE is a health care program used by military personnel and their families). While the House-passed version contained an amendment barring such practices, the Senate-passed version did not.
But taxpayer-funded abortions and trans procedures aren’t the only issues on which congressional Republican leadership capitulated to Democrats. The “negotiated” NDAA draft also does little to effectively address the prominence of neo-Marxist ideologies such as so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI, throughout the military.
Though euphemistically named, DEI is a poisonous left-wing framework that dismisses merit and instead discriminates based on characteristics such as skin color and sex. Individuals who qualify for a certain position on merit but don’t meet the discriminating entity’s goal of being more “diverse” are often passed over in favor of those who meet institutionally preferred identitarian standards.
An amendment included in the House version sought to prohibit the secretary of defense from “appointing or employing a military or civilian employee whose annual pay rate exceeds the equivalent of the rate payable for GS-10 to any position with duties related to [DEI] policy.” The finalized draft released Wednesday night, however, waters down this prohibition to only limit the cap to Pentagon civilian workers “whose primary duties are related to DEI.”
While the “negotiated” bill does include a provision barring the DOD from creating and filling new agency positions related to DEI, that prohibition is only temporary. As noted in the measure, the ban only lasts from the 2024 NDAA’s enactment until the U.S. comptroller general submits “the review of the Department of Defense diversity, equity, and inclusion workforce” required by the Senate Armed Services Committee to Congress. Gone is the House version’s provision to “eliminate every office within the Department of Defense established to promote” DEI.
The bill also fails to include an amendment from the House-passed version that would ban the Pentagon from using taxpayer funds to pay for “drag shows, drag queen story [hours], or similar event[s].” While the Defense Department banned drag-related events on military bases earlier this year, failure to codify the aforementioned provision into law effectively allows the agency to reverse its current policy anytime it chooses.
Moreover, the measure extends the federal government’s ability to use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, from the end of this year to April 2024. Recall that FISA was illegally abused by federal intel agencies in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election to illegally spy on former President Donald Trump’s campaign.
Of course, none of these facts have stopped GOP leadership from lying to voters about the finalized draft. In a Thursday tweet celebrating the bill, House Speaker Mike Johnson falsely claimed the 2024 NDAA will “weed out wokeness in the military” and “ban[] drag shows.”
Republican leadership’s failure to legislatively confront the Biden administration’s “reimagining” of the U.S. military has evoked ire from some conservatives such as Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas. Roy told The Federalist he will not support an NDAA that “doesn’t deliver on key conservative wins,” and further questioned how any member of Congress could advance the measure “with an unsecured southern border or without addressing the rampant abuses to our civil liberties with an unreformed FISA extension.”
“Republicans in the House did our job and passed one of the strongest NDAAs in decades putting a stop to Biden’s radical policies destroying the focus of the military,” Roy said. “Half measures will get us nowhere. Republicans must deliver real results.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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