House Passes NDAA to Push Military Spending Approved This Year Beyond $1 Trillion

Nearly all Republicans and 17 Democrats in the US House of Representatives voted Wednesday evening for a military bill that would push the figure for defense spending approved this year beyond $1 trillion.

The final vote for the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2026 was 231-196, with just four Republicans opposing the bill, which will still need to be reconciled with the Senate's version.

Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, highlighted after the vote that the House's NDAA authorizes about $883 billion for defense spending—including over $848 billion for the Pentagon, which has never passed an audit—on top of the $150 billion in the GOP budget reconciliation package that President Donald Trump signed in July.

"Throwing a trillion dollars at the Pentagon—an agency replete with waste and fraud—at the same time the Republican Congress and the Trump regime are slashing spending on healthcare, education, housing, food assistance, and foreign aid is a disgraceful and unconscionable misuse of taxpayer money," Weissman said, referring to other provisions in the earlier package.

"On top of the age-old dangerous and wasteful spending, the bill pours billions into new boondoggles like Trump's 'Golden Dome' space interceptor vanity project and supercharges the dangerous development of killer robots for the battlefield," he noted. "Making it still worse is the administration's in-your-face, authoritarian misuse of Pentagon dollars—from the deployment of the National Guard on the streets of Washington, DC, to the illegal and murderous attack on a Venezuelan boat."

Weissman added that "the bill includes some modest, positive requirements to report waste, fraud, and price gouging to Congress and establishes financial penalties if the Pentagon fails its audit. But these small measures do not begin to offset the damage done by the dangerous and wasteful overall package."

House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who voted against the NDAA's final passage, told Politico that "we didn't get any of the amendments and the debates that we wanted; not a single solitary one."

"Meanwhile, all manner of different issues that are pure culture war partisan issues were allowed in," he continued. "I fear that many of those are going to pass."

In a statement after the vote, the Congressional Equality Caucus condemned "six Republican-sponsored anti-LGBTQI+ amendments," including bans on medically necessary healthcare for transgender service members and dependents.

"The National Defense Authorization Act has traditionally received strong bipartisan support, yet for the second Congress in a row House Republicans have tainted a bill aimed at improving the lives of servicemembers with poison-pill riders that threaten our troops' rights, their families' stability, and our efforts to retain top talent," said the caucus chair, Rep. Mark Takano (D-Cailf.).

"Republicans' sacrifice of a strong bipartisan vote for a politicized NDAA to appease the Trump administration and a small slice of their base cannot undo the sacrifice of the transgender service members, cadets, or military dependents that will be hurt by this bill," he added. "Congress should be fighting for those who fight for us—but it's clear the GOP has other priorities. I will keep fighting to prevent the harmful provisions in this bill from becoming law."