Senate Passes Defense Bill, Setting Up Fight Over Abortion, Transgender Care

WASHINGTON—The Democratic-led Senate passed its version of the annual defense-policy bill with broad bipartisan support, putting the legislation on a collision course with the Republican-controlled House, which narrowly voted earlier this month to add contentious provisions that would restrict abortion access and transgender healthcare for troops.

The vote was 86-11.

“What’s happening in the Senate is a stark contrast to the partisan race to the bottom we saw in the House, where House Republicans are pushing partisan legislation that has zero chance of passing,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), ahead of the Senate vote. Schumer noted that the Senate process included votes on 98 amendments, many of them bipartisan.

“This is really important for our country,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.).

The Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2024, or NDAA, does share some central similarities with the House-passed version: Both would authorize $886 billion in spending on national security, including a 5.2% pay raise for service members and the Defense Department’s civilian workforce, and green light $300 million in security assistance for Ukraine.

But senators largely sidestepped the polarizing social issues that had roiled the House a few weeks earlier, when members of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus demanded and won amendment votes related to abortion and transgender care for service members.

Both amendments narrowly passed the House, mostly along party lines. One would overturn a Pentagon policy allowing troops leave and travel funds for reproductive healthcare—including abortion—and the other would prevent the Defense Department or Tricare, the military’s healthcare program, from providing gender-related surgeries and hormone treatments for transgender people.

House Republicans said they were delivering on their promise to end what they saw as the Biden administration’s inappropriate “social experiment” on the military, while Democrats complained that Republicans had hijacked a national-security bill to push a far-right political agenda. 

Senators mostly avoided the controversy—for now—by skipping floor votes on any amendments dealing with abortion access and transgender treatments in the military.

Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.), who opposes abortion, said adding an abortion amendment was too controversial to consider. “One way to gum up the works at this point is to get off into divisive issues like abortion,” Kennedy said. 

Lawmakers will now work behind closed doors to negotiate a compromise that combines the House and Senate NDAAs. Typically centrists from both parties come together to ensure the final product of these talks can pass both chambers by large margins, but the process could be complicated this year by divided government and culture-war politics as the country heads into next year’s elections.

The NDAA increases funding for military recruiting and advertising, implements higher standards for enlisted barracks and boosts investments in microelectronics, hypersonic weapons and drones.

One amendment, added to the bill with support from senators of both parties, would prevent any president from leaving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization without Senate approval.

Other bipartisan provisions would give the administration emergency powers to stop the trafficking of fentanyl and strengthen the Treasury Department’s enforcement over the use of crypto in illicit finance.

Additional notable measures relate to:

Aid to Taiwan

As with last year’s authorization, the Senate NDAA would bolster U.S. assistance to Taiwan. The Senate version envisions a closer relationship between the U.S. and Taiwan militaries, with the bill requiring the defense secretary to develop a comprehensive training program for Taiwan’s armed forces. That effort, the bill says, should enhance the two militaries’ capabilities to operate jointly and encourage information sharing. 

The bill also aims to push forward a measure in last year’s defense authorization that gave the president the authority to draw from U.S. military stockpiles to aid Taiwan. Implementation has been slow, in part because the administration is already drawing on those stocks to arm Ukraine. To address that, this year’s bill authorizes replenishment of those stockpiles once tapped, whether for Ukraine or Taiwan.

Foreign investment in farmland

The Senate added a provision largely preventing foreign entities from China, Russia, Iran or North Korea from buying U.S. farmland, in response to national security concerns about such purchases. 

The measure also authorizes the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or Cfius, to review foreigners’ purchases or leases of more than 320 acres of farmland, or those valued at $5 million or more. The multiagency panel can advise the president to block or unwind foreign acquisitions for security concerns.

U.S. investment in China

One provision would require American investors to notify the Treasury Department about stakes they take in certain Chinese technology sectors, including artificial intelligence, advanced semiconductors and satellite communications. The Biden administration has also been working on an executive order that would in some ways go further than the Senate amendment by banning certain investments in China—as well as requiring disclosure of others. The goal of the efforts is to stop American money and knowledge from helping China develop technology that could be used for military purposes. 

UFO documents 

Another bipartisan amendment that made it into the legislation would give federal agencies 300 days to hand over documents related to unidentified anomalous phenomena to a newly established review board with the power to declassify them. The proposal is modeled after a 1992 law declassifying documents related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, requiring public release within 25 years.

AI push

Several provisions relate to artificial intelligence, which Schumer described as “early initial steps” in his push for the Senate to legislate on AI, in response to mass consumer adoption of ChatGPT and other new AI systems. It calls for two federal studies of AI risks, one covering vulnerabilities in AI-enabled military applications and the other looking at use of AI in the financial industry. It also tells the Pentagon to create a “bug bounty” program offering rewards for identifying flaws in large AI systems being integrated into military operations. 

Microchip manufacturing

A proposal led by Sens. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) and Todd Young (R., Ind.) would speed up permitting projects for domestic microchip manufacturing by streamlining approval for projects already under construction, such as two manufacturing centers in Arizona for chip manufacturers Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

Healthcare for 9/11 first responders and survivors

Senators voted to deliver nearly $700 million to close a funding gap for the World Trade Center Health Program that provides medical treatment and monitoring for 9/11 first responders and survivors. The provision also would for the first time expand eligibility to Defense Department employees who served at the Pentagon and the United 93 crash site on Sept. 11, 2001.

—Charles Hutzler, Ryan Tracy, Andrew Duehren and Kristina Peterson contributed to this article.

Write to Lindsay Wise at [email protected] and Simon J. Levien at [email protected]