Every late spring and summer, Congress takes up a host of national-security legislation. The National Defense Authorization Act sets top-line Pentagon funding levels and implements military policy. The House and Senate Armed Services Committee owns this legislation, which can often over 2,000 pages. The Appropriations Committee funds agencies and programs under Defense Department jurisdiction. All are big, oftentimes messy bills that number from the hundreds to thousands of pages.
Compare today’s legislative megaliths to the first NDAA that passed in 1961:
As one of my old Virginia Military Institute professors used to say, God lives in simplicity.
Whether the national defense of the United States is better served by long bills or short bills remains up for debate. I’ve worked on a dozen of them and couldn’t give you a straight answer. But the sentiment that this annual legislation has grown stupider over the years is somewhat less contentious. Even a decade ago, when I worked on the House Armed Services Committee, we would give out an award to the Republican and Democratic staffer who had to field the dumbest amendment from their members. My hands down favorite was a proposal to create “atheist chaplains” with a full rank structure and promotion pathway. It is difficult to imagine that being proposed in 1961.
Last week, the House took up the NDAA for its annual floor debate. That is, when the bill clears from committee and moves to the mercy of the Rules Committee — the House floor’s traffic cops — and then the rest of the non-Armed Services Committee Congressmen. As we said in the Senate, “The House never disappoints” when it comes to raw entertainment value. Rep. Adam Schiff proposed an amendment to force the Pentagon to study alternative proteins in meals. Representative Elenor Holmes Norton tried to turn the D.C. National Guard over to the mayor and tried to slip in an amendment in to ban U.S. nuclear forces. Requiring the intelligence community to draft National Intelligence Estimates about climate change, mandating the Post Office create an onerous new reporting requirement for postal-carrier traffic accidents (we have an existing entity called police for that), and dumping a large Water Data Act that can’t pass in its appropriate committee represent just a few other goofy ideas that were submitted for debate.
It was refreshing when I moved to the Senate, a chamber created by the Founding Fathers for the express purpose to tell the House “No.” There we would often see over 700 amendments introduced to the NDAA, but only 3–4 would be taken up for debate and a few unobjectionable others would be together for passage by voice vote. But even the stuffier, snobbier chamber was not without its sins. The Senate has seen amendments to muck around with census reporting, a conscientious push to tack a massive, dumb credit-card bill onto legislation that has nothing to do with credit cards, and — for some reason — there always seems to be some damned foolish thing related to an endangered bird or frog who had the poor fortune to nest near a military base.
It is good that legislators have a say in, well, legislating. But the defense bill needs to be sharp, clean, and unburdened by foolish fripperies. Because the NDAA is the only bill that still reliably passes each year, lawmakers scramble to dump every weird priority and staffer fancy onto legislation that is supposed to guarantee the survival of the United States as a sovereign and independent entity.
Frogs, credit cards, water management may require, from time to time, congressional attention. Fortunately, there are 21 other major committees (in the House alone) not named Armed Services. All of which have the same constitutional powers. All of which are well suited to manage issues that are not related to the national defense of America’s interests, peoples, and borders. Congress should consider using them.