TITLE: Congress Sends Largest Defense Bill in History to Biden’s Desk
https://www.thefiscaltimes.com/newsletter/20231214-Congress-Sends-Largest-Defense-Bill-History-Biden-s-Desk
EXCERPT: Lawmakers have been battling over the bill for months, with the House passing a version last summer that included controversial provisions touching on hot-button issues like abortion access and transgender health care in the military. Those provisions were largely stripped from the final bill, although a few of the culture-war elements remained, part of conservatives’ effort to end what they call “wokeness” in the Pentagon.
The watering down of the anti-wokeness provisions angered some conservatives in the House. Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy railed against the bill Thursday morning for failing to advance conservative priorities. “There is no justification for supporting a bill that does not materially change the direction of our military away from social engineering,” Roy said on the floor. “A vote for this bill is a perpetuation of the woke policies undermining our military, bringing down the morale, driving down recruiting and now undermining the civil liberties of the American people.”
A last-minute effort by Roy to adjourn the House before the NDAA vote could be held failed.
Another controversial measure in the bill revolved around the short-term reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which relates to a warrantless surveillance program. Critics on both the left and the right say the program violates privacy by allowing the government to eavesdrop on communications that could include American citizens, but national security officials say it’s an essential intelligence tool. The 2024 NDAA extends the program until mid-April.
Rep. Jim Himes, the House Intelligence Committee’s senior Democrat, called on lawmakers to allow Section 702 to continue while working on a better version. “By God, let’s reform it. But do not let it expire,” he said. “If it expires, Americans and allies will die." (Read more about Section 702 here and here.)
What else is in the bill: The 2024 NDAA will keep the Pentagon and defense-related efforts at other agencies funded through the 2024 fiscal year, which began in October. Some highlights from the roughly 3,100-page bill:
* Authorizes $886 billion in defense spending, a roughly 3% increase from 2023.
* The topline figure breaks down into $168 billion for procurement, $145 billion for research and development, $289 billion for operations and maintenance, $216 billion for personnel, $17 billion for military construction, and $32 billion for nuclear programs.
* Provides a 5.2% pay raise for service members, the largest boost in more than 20 years.
* As part of the strategic shift toward China, the bill authorizes $14.7 billion for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, which includes assistance for Taiwan.
* The bill prohibits the teaching of “critical race theory” in the military and eliminates the position of the Chief Diversity Officer at the Department of Defense. It also eliminates funding for “drag shows, Drag Queen Story Hours, or similar events” as well as the Countering Extremism Working Group, which Republicans say is “politically biased.”
* The cases of about 8,000 service members who were discharged from the military for refusing to take the Covid-19 vaccine will be reviewed for possible reinstatement.
* The bill includes a measure that would prevent a U.S. president from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO.
TITLE: Congress stuffs $25 billion into Pentagon contractor stockings
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/pentagon-budget/
EXCERPT: Broken down by bill section, there were 172 increases for procurement between the House and Senate at a cost of $14 billion, and 943 for research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) at a cost of $10.5 billion. When the House version of the Defense Appropriations bill came to the floor, lawmakers added 11 more program increases for procurement, and another 90 for RDT&E, for a combined $1.1 billion.
While these kinds of adds are nothing new, their numbers do seem to be growing, particularly in the RDT&E category. In fact, the number of RDT&E top-ups has grown by 72% in the past four years, from 600 for FY2021, to 776 for FY2022, to 996 for FY2023, up to 1,033 for FY2024.
More troubling still is that 1,010 of the total 1,216 increases, or $14.5 billion of the $25.7 billion lawmakers have added to these accounts, are for projects the Pentagon didn’t fund at all in its budget request.
Are they earmarks?
According to Congress, these increases aren’t earmarks, but in practice, they often serve the same purpose and are not subject to transparency reforms traditional earmarks have faced since 2007.
Traditional earmarks, rebranded by Congress as “congressionally directed funding” or “community project funding,” support projects that fund a specific entity for a specific purpose in a specific place. This made them a favored tool for lawmakers to funnel taxpayer dollars into their district or state. But these earmarks come with rules, requiring members to put their names on them, and in the House’s case, requiring members to list their earmarks on their websites.
Program increases are not bound by these rules. They have no name attached (apart from amendments, which list their sponsors) and generally lack any accompanying justification. In the Senate Appropriations Committee report on the Pentagon spending bill, a section on “funding increases” stipulates that “funding increases shall be competitively awarded, or provided to programs that have received competitive awards in the past.” So Congress seems to differentiate these increases from earmarks on the basis that they’re competitively awarded, unlike traditional earmarks. In practice, that rationale breaks down.
Next-gen earmarks
One program increase allocates $2 million for “urban subterranean mapping technology,” a fancy name for tunnel detection. This increase has appeared in every Pentagon spending bill since FY2020, for a total of $17 million over five years, but there’s almost no publicly available information about this project. That is other than Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) regular celebrations of funding for West Virginia-based Marshall University to research urban subterranean mapping technology in press release after press release after press release after press release, all of which were published before the funds they celebrate were formally awarded.
Some adds are even more blatantly noncompetitive. In the House, someone added $7 million for “Omniblast water sensor technology.” If that sounds weirdly specific, it’s because it is. The Omniblast water sensor is a trademarked product, owned by a company called Advanced Materials and Devices (AMAD), Inc. It goes without saying that program increases for patented products can only be fulfilled by the patent owners, so AMAD Inc. is more than a shoe-in for any “competitive” award process. And while AMAD Inc. was awarded a contract for “a wearable underwater blast sensor” in 2022, it was the only bidder, suggesting a not so competitive process in the past.
As to whether this funding, like an earmark, is meant to serve the political interests of a specific lawmaker, we can’t know for sure without knowing the author. But AMAD Inc. is based in Reno, Nevada, in the district of Rep. Mark Amodei’s (R-Nev.), who sits on the House Appropriations Committee. While AMAD Inc. hasn’t made any political contributions to Rep. Amodei’s campaigns, it did spend $150,000 on lobbying in 2022, and $120,000 on lobbying in the first three quarters of 2023, expenses paid to a lobbying firm called Cornerstone Government Affairs. Cornerstone donated $3,000 to Rep. Amodei so far in the 2024 election cycle, its first time contributing to any of his campaigns.
Unjustified adds, unjustifiable secrecy
Asked about these program increases, a Senate Appropriations Committee staffer pointed to the unfunded priorities they fund as a justification. But there are two problems with that argument. One is that Unfunded Priorities Lists (UPLs) are just that: unfunded, meaning the Pentagon didn’t find them important enough to include in its $826 billion request. Almost by definition, items on these UPLs are non-priorities for the Pentagon. The second problem is that UPLs only accounted for about $1.9 billion of the $25.7 billion lawmakers added to the Pentagon’s request for procurement and RDT&E.
TITLE: Congress greenlights psychedelic treatment bill for active duty service members suffering from PTSD
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/14/ndaa-congress-psychedelics-ptsd-dan-crenshaw/
EXCERPT: Included in the [NDAA] was U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s Douglas Mike Day Psychedelic Therapy to Save Lives Act, legislation that will direct the Defense Department to create grants for studying psychedelic treatments for active duty service members.
The psychedelic substances include MDMA; psilocybin, found in many species of mushrooms; plant-based therapies; and others. Active-duty service members will be able to participate in the studies if they get clearance from DOD and are diagnosed with certain post-traumatic conditions. Participants will only be able to use the psychedelics in a controlled environment with a therapist.
Using psychedelics to treat PTSD is not new. The Department of Veterans Affairs already studies the use of psychedelics for treating veterans with positive results for recovery, and the federal government studied psychedelics potential in the 50s and 60s. Crenshaw’s legislation scales up studies for active duty service members and gives DOD the authority to financially partner with other agencies and academic institutions.
“We have to think outside the box,” Crenshaw said during a June news conference unveiling the bill. “We're never going to understand the extent to which psychedelics can help our service members until we start actually doing the necessary clinical trials in a controlled environment.”
Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL, has been pushing for the measure for years. The House included and passed the bill in the NDAA in 2022, but the Senate dropped the provision.
The bill is named after Douglas “Mike” Day, a Navy SEAL who died by suicide after getting severely injured by multiple bullet wounds in Iraq.
“When you think of a hero, you think of a guy like Mike,” Crenshaw said. “Yet like so many other warriors, after Mike made it back home, he began an entirely different, more insidious battle. A battle with the demons that followed him.