Author: Patricia Zengler and Julia Hart
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. lawmakers unveiled an annual defense policy bill on Sunday that authorizes a record $901 billion in national security spending next year, billions more than President Donald Trump has requested, and provides $400 million in military aid to Ukraine.
The 3,000-page bill includes a 4% pay raise for military service members but does not include a bipartisan effort to spur housing construction that some lawmakers had hoped would be included in the final bill.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, said in a statement that the legislation would advance Trump’s agenda by “ending the Pentagon’s woke ideology, securing the border, revitalizing the defense industrial base and restoring the warrior spirit.”
The measure is a compromise between versions of the National Defense Authorization Act passed by the Senate and House of Representatives, which were controlled by Trump’s fellow Republicans earlier this year.
Trump asked Congress in May to provide a defense budget of $892.6 billion for fiscal year 2026, the same as 2025 spending. This includes funding for the Department of Defense and other agencies and programs involved in security and defence.
The House bill set spending at that level, but the Senate approved $925 billion.
The National Defense Authorization Act authorizes Pentagon programs but does not fund them. Congress must separately pass the funds in a spending bill for the fiscal year that ends in September 2026.
In addition to typical NDAA provisions about buying military equipment and improving competitiveness with competitors such as China and Russia, this year’s bill focuses on cutting programs criticized by Trump, such as diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and the deployment of troops to the U.S. southwest border to intercept undocumented immigrants and drugs.
It also repeals two resolutions from 1991 and 2002 that authorized the use of military force in Iraq.
The massive NDAA is considered “must-pass” legislation, one of several major pieces of legislation passed by Congress each year, and lawmakers are proud to have passed it every year for more than six decades.
The bill typically comes after weeks of closed-door negotiations between Republican and Democratic lawmakers. But this year’s process was more partisan than usual.
Some Democrats are threatening to delay measures targeting Trump’s use of the military in U.S. cities until Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, agrees to hold hearings on the issue this week.
Earlier this year, Republicans defeated Democratic efforts to block the deployment of troops to U.S. cities and ban the conversion of a luxury jet supplied by Qatar into Air Force One.
(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle and Julia Harte; Editing by Sergio Non and Diane Craft)
