Leading defense authorizers say they hope to move swiftly on a top legislative priority — the annual, must-pass defense policy bill — when Congress returns to town in a month and a half.
“We have to be ready when we come back to go right to the ‘Big Four’ meeting, and that’s our objective,” Senate Armed Services Chairman Jack Reed, D-R.I., told reporters last week, referring to the chairmen and ranking members of the Armed Services committees.
Those negotiations would clear the way for the release of a final, compromise version of the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act. Congress has passed the bill annually for more than 60 years.
But before a bipartisan, bicameral bill can come together, lawmakers have to resolve differences between the House’s approach, in which members advanced a plan laden with divisive, conservative measures that Democrats largely oppose, and the Senate’s bipartisan legislation that would spend billions of dollars more than was agreed to in a 2023 debt limit law.
Asked about the biggest obstacles to reaching a compromise with the House, Reed, who is also on the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, seemed to nod to some of those House GOP-approved measures.
“They’re generally not along the lines of DOD issues, per se. They’re more political and social,” he said.
Lawmakers also have to reconcile the topline funding recommendation for programs at the Defense Department and other U.S. national security initiatives. The House bill would authorize $883.7 billion, sticking to the caps laid out in the 2023 debt limit deal, but the Senate Armed Services Committee would authorize $25 billion more.
House Armed Services Vice Chairman Rob Wittman, R-Va., predicted in September that the debt deal’s caps would become “the bottom line for” the compromise version of the NDAA.
And lawmakers will be pushing to find a resolution to all that during a compressed legislative time period. Though staff work on the bill has already begun, and is set to continue through recess, some major sticking points will need to be overcome at the “Big Four” level before a final version can be considered by the full House and Senate.
The House and Senate are slated to resume work in Washington on Nov. 12, commencing a lame-duck session that includes five scheduled weeks of session before both chambers depart for the Christmas holiday.
“I’d like to see the NDAA hopefully get done by the end of the month in November, which I think is realistic,” Wittman said. “And then that helps us, too, in trying to navigate where we go with appropriations.”
Informal conferencing underway
The path to informal conference was officially cleared when the Senate Armed Services Committee’s leaders filed a bloc of 93 amendments to their bill on Sept. 19, provisions that will be considered in the bicameral negotiations.
That informal conference process, a trend of the NDAA in recent years, involves lengthy conversations — largely at the staff level — between chambers that produce a final version acceptable to both the House and Senate, as well as the president.
Because those 93 amendments are largely uncontroversial provisions that have the backing of both parties, they’re unlikely to pose any significant hurdles to reaching agreement on a final NDAA.
The provisions include authorization bills for the State Department, U.S. intelligence agencies and Coast Guard programs, as well as pitches to help countries such as Ukraine and Taiwan and limit Pentagon procurement of weapons or parts of weapons from U.S. adversaries.
Instead, the focus will be on the underlying bill texts, particularly the version that the House passed in June with the support of only six Democrats after a slew of so-called culture war provisions were adopted on the floor. The approach mirrored the one GOP leaders took last year on a bill that is typically bipartisan.
The final, compromise bill is likely to do away with many of the more contentious components of the House plan — assuming last year’s process repeats itself.
But the gap in funding levels adds a wrinkle to the informal conference.
Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said last week that the topline is “probably the main negotiation point.”
Asked about bridging that gap, Senate Armed Services member Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said the bottom line to him is that more dollars are needed for DOD.
“Question is, do you do it under an emergency supplemental or do you try to put it into the base package, and what are you going to do next year?” he said in an interview. “Funding is going to have to be there, and we’d better be able to make sure that we’ve got a workable Department of Defense.”
The Senate Appropriations Committee has gotten behind an $852.2 billion fiscal 2025 spending bill that is nearly $21 billion above the discretionary allocation for Defense. Lawmakers got around the cap by calling the funds emergency spending.
Reed said that he thinks the emergency spending addition to the Senate spending bill will pave the way for authorizers to resolve their own difference in toplines between the House and Senate NDAAs.
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