Congress Passes Gargantuan Defense Spending Bill
Jose Nino
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On December 14, 2023, the United States House of Representatives passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by a vote of 310 to 118. This bill includes a record-breaking $886 billion in yearly military spending and facilitates the deployment of military aid to Ukraine and provides resources to resist China’s advances in the Indo-Pacific region.
Apart from the appropriations legislation that establishes government spending levels, the NDAA gives the greenlight to pay increases for troops in addition to purchases of ammunition, aircraft, and ships.
This year’s NDAA is a monstrosity of a bill that is close to 3,100 pages long and grants Congress the power to spend a record $886 billion on so-called “defense”, which represents a 3% increase from the previous year. In effect, Congress has passed an NDAA for 63 consecutive years.
The final version of the NDAA scrapped provisions dealing with controversial social issues, such as abortion access and treatment of transgender military members, that had been tacked on to the version passed by the Republican-controlled House. Democrats included these provisions in an ostensive effort to derail this legislation.
The Senate, which is under Democratic control, approved the NDAA by a vote of 87 to 13 on December 13.
The 2024 NDAA also featured a four-month extension of a controversial domestic surveillance power, which gave elected officials more time to either reform or maintain the program, better known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)’s Section 702 .
Overall, the constant passage of the NDAA demonstrates how wedded to big military spending the DC ruling class is. None of this is for the purpose of defense, but rather to maintain a universalist foreign policy agenda that seeks to spread the US’s degenerate values abroad.
Such military largesse will only end when America First nationalists, who preach foreign policy realism and restraint, fully take over political affairs in DC.
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