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national defense authorization act
Military Budget Bill Would Ramp Up Israel Aid to Fill In 'Gaps' When Other Countries Impose Embargoes Over Genocide
The House Armed Services Committee said in September that the measure "combats antisemitism."
Dec 09, 2025
A little-reported provision of the latest military spending bill would direct the US to create a plan to fill the "gaps" for Israel whenever other nations cut off arms shipments in response to its acts of genocide in Gaza.
As Prem Thakker reported Monday for Zeteo, the measure is "buried" more than 1,000 pages into the more than 3,000-page National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which is considered by lawmakers to be “must-pass" legislation and contains a record $901 billion in total spending.
Republicans are shepherding the bill through the US House of Representatives, where—as is the case with most NDAAs—it is expected to pass on Wednesday with Democratic support, even as some conservative budget hardliners refuse to back it, primarily over its $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine.
Since the genocide began following Hamas' attack on October 7, 2023, the US has provided more than $21.7 billion to Israel, including hundreds of millions that have been supplied through NDAAs.
The new NDAA includes at least another $650 million to Israel, an increase of $45 million from the previous one, even though this is the first such bill to be introduced since the "ceasefire" that went into effect in October. This aid from the Pentagon comes on top of the $3.3 billion already provided through the State Department budget.
But this NDAA also contains an unprecedented measure. It calls for the “continual assessment of [the] impact of international state arms embargoes on Israel and actions to address defense capability gaps."
The NDAA directs Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to assess “the scope, nature, and impact on Israel’s defense capabilities of current and emerging arms embargoes, sanctions, restrictions, or limitations imposed by foreign countries or by international organizations,” and “the resulting gaps or vulnerabilities in Israel’s security posture.”
As Drop Site News explains, "this means the US would explicitly use federal law to step in and supply weapons to Israel whenever other countries cut off arms to halt Israel’s ongoing violations across the region."
"The point of this assistance, to be clear, is to make up for any identified insufficiencies Israel may have due to other countries' embargoing it as a result of its ongoing genocide in Palestine," Thakker wrote.
A similar provision appeared in a September version of the NDAA, which the House Armed Services Committee praised because it supposedly “combats antisemitism"—explicitly conflating a bias against Jewish people with weapons embargoes that countries have imposed to stop Israel from continuing its routine, documented human rights violations in Gaza.
Among the nations that have cut off weapons sales to Israel are Japan, Canada, France, Italy, and Spain. Meanwhile, other major backers, such as the United Kingdom and Germany, have imposed partial freezes on certain weaponry.
While official estimates from the Gaza Ministry of Health place the number of dead from Israel's military campaign at over 70,000, with more than 170,000 wounded, an independent assessment last month from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany and the Center for Demographic Studies in Spain found that the death toll “likely exceeds 100,000." This finding mirrored several other studies that have projected the true death toll to be much higher than what official estimates show.
Embargoes against Israel have been called for by a group of experts mandated by the United Nations Human Rights Council, including Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. Meanwhile, numerous human rights organizations, including the leading Israeli group B’Tselem, have said Israel’s campaign in Gaza has amounted to genocide.
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Warfare Over Healthcare: My Premium Skyrockets to $2600 Per Month
For the first time in my adult life, I will be uninsured, joining the millions who have navigated this risky reality for years. And for what? Multi-trillion-dollar wars and endless tax breaks for the wealthy.
Nov 25, 2025
Next year, an estimated 5 million people will be priced out of health insurance in the United States. I am one of them. When I went to renew my family’s policy, I was shocked to discover my premium had gone up to $2,600 per month, a price my household of four simply cannot afford. For the first time in my adult life, I will be uninsured, joining the millions who have navigated this risky reality for years. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, especially when health insurance already makes access to healthcare costly with extremely unrealistic deductibles and high out-of-pocket costs. Yet, as a woman in my 40s with a family history of breast cancer, going without coverage is a gamble with my life.
After some number-crunching, we concluded that we could afford to carry insurance for only 2 of the 4 of us. This left us with an inhuman choice: to decide whose lives we value more. This is not just an abstract dilemma that many households are facing; it is necropolitics in action, the state-sanctioned power to decide who lives and dies. This crisis is a direct result of political choices made by those elected to serve the people and their needs. By allowing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies to expire, our elected officials are acting as death panels, comfortable with making a decision that will kill off tens of thousands of their own constituents. This is not hyperbole; studies show that over 40,000 people in the US die annually due to a lack of healthcare.
However, these domestic necropolitics are merely a symptom of the US’ larger death wish: a war economy that serves weapons manufacturers whose job is to create machines of death and destruction. As a nation, we manage to muster up trillions each year to fund global conflict and destruction while claiming the price of keeping our own alive is too much. Our government’s priorities could not be any clearer. For example, in the recent government shutdown, the National Priorities Project reported that the Senate managed to find bipartisan unity to approve a $32 billion increase for the Pentagon as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), passing it with an overwhelming 77-20 vote. Yet, they refused to extend the healthcare subsidies for even a single year, a measure that would have cost roughly $35 billion, a well-worth sum that would keep millions, including myself, from losing their health insurance.
This is not a one-off, though. Congress passes an ever-growing Pentagon budget every year, now set to exceed a trillion dollars. The 2026 NDAA will be voted on in mid-December. Around the same time, there are whispers of a vote on the healthcare subsidies that could save millions of families from our nightmare. However, only one of these bills is certain to pass with little debate, and it is not the one that will save lives.
We live in a system that values war and conflict over the protection of life, and every day they decide that it is okay for more and more of us to die.
To understand the deadly consequences of these priorities, consider that the annual cost of continuing the ACA subsidies is about $30 billion, or roughly $82 million per day. The daily cost of operating a single US aircraft carrier is approximately $8 million. This means that the cost of one carrier for a single day is equivalent to about 10% of the daily cost of providing healthcare subsidies for the entire nation. In other words, the funds spent on one warship for just one day could instead ensure a day of healthcare access for hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The math makes it clear that the US government is not in the business of serving the people and their needs. Instead, our elected officials sit in high places, callously deciding who they are willing to kill off in order protect their personal vested interest, whether it be Palestinians in Gaza, children in Sudan, boaters in Venezuela, migrants seeking a better life, or hard-working families desperately trying to make ends meet in an economy that only serves a few rather than the many. We live in a system that values war and conflict over the protection of life, and every day they decide that it is okay for more and more of us to die. It is necropolitics, all the way down, and we are all on the chopping block. Unless…
To learn more about how to fund the people's needs over war manufacturers' greed, please visit our Cut The Pentagon website for more ways to take action.
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Trump Calls for GOP to Ram Through AI Regulation Ban in Must-Pass Military Spending Bill
"If lawmakers are serious about AI governance, they must create strong, enforceable national protections as a regulatory floor—not wipe out state laws so Big Tech can operate without consequence," said one consumer advocate.
Nov 19, 2025
A Republican push to stop state legislatures from regulating artificial intelligence, including chatbots that have been found to pose harm to children, resoundingly failed over the summer, with 99 out of 100 senators voting against the provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—but the previous rejection of the idea isn't stopping President Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers from trying again to impose a moratorium.
On Tuesday, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that House Republicans should take action against "overregulation by the States" in the AI field.
Claiming that "DEI ideology" in AI models in some states will "undermine this Major Growth 'Engine'" and that "Investment in AI is helping to make the U.S. Economy the 'HOTTEST' in the World"—despite tech industry leaders' warnings that the value of AI investments may have been wildly overestimated and the bubble may be on the cusp of bursting—Trump called on Republicans to include the state regulations ban in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), "or pass a separate Bill."
Also on Tuesday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) told Punchbowl News that the GOP is considering adding language to the NDAA that would effectively ban state AI regulations, which have been passed in both Democratic- and Republican-led states. Those laws would be nullified if Republicans follow through with the plan.
Since the annual defense spending bill is considered a must-pass package by many lawmakers, inserting amendments related to other legislative goals is a common strategy used in Congress.
Trump previously tried to circumvent Congress' rejection of the moratorium in July, when he announced his AI Action Plan.
Emphasizing that the anti-regulatory effort has been rejected by "an alliance of Democrats, Republicans, social conservatives, parents rights groups, medical professionals, and child online protection groups," the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen on Tuesday called Trump's renewal of the push "highly inappropriate" and said it "would risk stripping away vital civil rights, consumer protection, and safety authority from states without putting any federal guardrails in place."
JB Branch, Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen, said that "AI preemption strips away the safeguards states have enacted to address the very real harms of AI."
"Big Tech and its allies have spent months trying to ban states from protecting their own residents, all while refusing to support any meaningful federal AI safeguards," said Branch. "Congress should reject this maneuver outright. If lawmakers are serious about AI governance, they must create strong, enforceable national protections as a regulatory floor—not wipe out state laws so Big Tech can operate without consequence.”
On Tuesday, the Republican-controlled House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing on "AI Chatbot Advantages and Disadvantages," where one witness, psychologist Marlynn Wei, warned that "AI chatbots endorse users 50% more than humans would on ill-advised behaviors."
In September, several grieving parents testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that their children had died by suicide after being encouraged to take their own lives by AI chatbots.
At Tuesday's hearing, Ranking Member Frank Pallone (D-NJ) said that "Congress must be sure to allow states to put in place safeguards that protect their residents."
"There is no reason for Congress to stop states from regulating the harms of AI when Congress has not yet passed a similar law," he said.
Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) also addressed the issue, suggesting it was surprising that the Republican members would bother holding a hearing on the harms of AI when they are planning to strip state lawmakers of their ability to protect their constituents from those harms.
"I'm having real difficulty in reconciling this hearing and all that we've heard about the risks of AI chatbots, especially to our children, with the attempt by the House Republican leadership to ban state-level AI regulations," said Trahan. "Republicans' push for this regressive, unconstitutional, and widely condemned AI policy is real and it's unrelenting."
👀MUST WATCH: @RepLoriTrahan takes down House GOP’s efforts to slip the disastrous AI preemption into the NDAA — wiping out state laws that protect kids, seniors, and veterans. It’s a big handout for Big Tech. pic.twitter.com/8NxdkcDgul
— The Tech Oversight Project (@Tech_Oversight) November 18, 2025
"Let's just say in public what you are pushing in private," she added. "Don't be holding these hearings about the risks of AI chatbots while behind closed doors you kneecap state legislatures from protecting their constituents. I mean, if the AI moratorium is the topic in the speaker's office let's make it so in this hearing room, because the American people deserve to know where you truly stand on AI regulation."
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