The US House of Representative just approved (by a vote of 269 to 151) the $612 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) funding moar warmongery for fiscal year 2016. However, the vote came short of a veto-proof majority and since the administration opposes the defense policy bill - for its alleged budgeting "gimmicks," as well as its provisions for arming Ukrainian forces - we suspect President Obama is preparing to unleash the veto pen.
As The Military Times reports,
The measure includes an overhaul of the military's retirement system and rejects a host of pay and benefits trims proposed by the Pentagon. It supports, in principle, a 2.3 percent pay raise for troops, but lacks the legislative language to force that paycheck boost, leaving flexibility for President Obama to go with the lower 1.3 percent raise backed by Pentagon leaders.
The bill also includes a host of new policy changes on sexual assault protections and prosecution, reforms to the defense acquisition process, and restrictions on transfer of detainees out of Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"There are a lot of good things in this bill," Smith said Friday. "But we have one overarching problem, the same that we've had since 2011. ... This bill's reliance on the overseas contingency (account) is a problem for the Department of Defense. This doesn't lift the budget caps, and that is harmful."
The bill, as RT reports, [6] authorizes $515 billion for so-called national defense spending, $89.2 billion for an emergency war fund and an additional $7.7 billion in mandatory defense spending that does not receive authorization from Congress.
Yet the $612 billion bill was opposed by many Democratic lawmakers who have criticized the Republican majority for ignoring defense budget caps approved by Congress in 2011 to address federal deficits. Democrats say by boosting the emergency war fund -- which is not in the purview of the Budget Control Act of 2011 -- Republicans sought to evade the law to increase military spending but will not do the same for similar caps on domestic spending.
Prior to Friday's vote, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi pledged to oppose the NDAA for the additional war funding that comes without offsets.
"The Republican defense authorization bill before the House is both bad budgeting and harmful to military planning — perpetuating uncertainty and instability in the defense budget, and damaging the military's ability to plan and prepare for the future," Pelosi wrote to her House colleagues.
"As Defense Secretary (Ash) Carter said last week, Republicans' approach is 'clearly a road to nowhere,' 'managerially unsound' and 'unfairly dispiriting to our force.'"
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry called on Congress to pass the bill despite ongoing disputes over the 2011 law.
"The idea that we would hold the military and pay and their weapons and the policies involved hostage in the hopes we can put enough pressure to have the president and Congress somehow come together to fix these other problems, I just think that's unrealistic," Thornberry said, according to The Hill.
Republican House speaker John Boehner said top Democrats were "downright shameful" for helping to pass the NDAA out of committee only to oppose it during the broader vote.
The White House, meanwhile, has threatened to veto the NDAA for the war funding provisions, as well as restrictions the bill would place on transferring detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. The White House also opposed measures in the bill that would seek to arm Ukrainian forces fighting Russian-allied separatists and that would attempt to fund Iraqi Kurdish fighters without approval from the Iraqi government.
The Obama administration also criticized Republicans for ignoring other cost-saving measures, including base closures and retirement of the Air Force A-10 'Warthog' fleet.
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