Compromise defense bill clears House

$618.7B measure drops bid for female draft registration

Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas
Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas

WASHINGTON -- The House voted overwhelmingly on Friday to pass a $618.7 billion defense policy bill after negotiators dropped many proposed policy changes, such as requiring women to register for the draft and allowing federal contractors to make religion-based hiring decisions.

The Senate is expected to follow suit next week when senators vote on the annual measure to authorize spending for Pentagon programs and war operations, but it is not yet clear that the White House will sign the bill into law.

The annual defense authorization bill, which the House passed by a vote of 375 to 34, is considered a must-pass measure. Arkansas' four representatives, all Republicans, voted for the bill.

Despite frequent heated political disputes over the legislation, Congress has managed to pass a defense authorization bill for each of the past 54 years.

But the compromise that Senate and House negotiators released earlier this week, after months of negotiations, did not fully address one point that President Barack Obama's administration previously warned could trigger a veto: The defense bill pays for programs by budgeting an additional $3.2 billion of war funds above and beyond what lawmakers agreed to spend in a two-year budget deal struck last year.

The defense policy bill sets funding levels for improving military readiness, reconfiguring the acquisition process and increasing the size of the services.

But the White House has resisted efforts to put extra war funds toward such programs, objecting to the move because war funds are not subject to budget caps. The White House has insisted that there must be parity between spending on defense programs and spending on nondefense programs, such as infrastructure, education and food stamps -- and tapping into war funds is a way to get around such restrictions.

Last year, Obama vetoed Congress' first attempt at the defense policy bill over concerns about its over-reliance on war funds, sending it back to negotiators to make changes and pass a defense bill revamped along the lines of the two-year budget deal that the president eventually signed into law.

This year, Republicans had wanted to use as much as $18 billion of extra war funds to pay for defense programs. But in the end, disputes over money were easier for Republican and Democratic negotiators to resolve than several of the policy changes proposed in the House and Senate versions of the bill.

Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said he is hopeful President-elect Donald Trump, who pledged during the campaign to spend more on the military, will ask Congress early next year to boost fiscal 2017 military spending even further.

The White House did consider veto-worthy a provision that fell out of the bill at the eleventh hour of negotiations. It would have exempted religious organizations with federal contractors from observing civil-rights law and the Americans With Disabilities Act. The proposed change, sponsored by Rep. Steve Russell, R-Okla., was effectively directed at overriding a 2014 executive order making it illegal for federal contractors to discriminate against workers on the basis of sexual orientation or gender.

Gay- and transgender-rights advocates strongly protested, but Republican negotiators agreed to drop the language only after the election of Trump, who had promised during the campaign to rip up Obama's executive orders -- potentially including the 2014 order about workplace discrimination directed at federal contractors.

Women and Draft

Republicans won a fight against including language in the bill requiring women to begin registering for the Selective Service for a potential draft, a fight that began when lawmakers opposed to the Pentagon's recent announcement to open up all combat roles to women launched it as a test measure.

A majority of lawmakers on both the House and Senate Armed Services committees supported such language, but House leaders yanked the change out of their version of the defense policy bill before it hit the floor.

After the bill was voted on, the White House said in a statement that the Obama administration supported the idea of extending draft registration to women.

"Universal registration both furthers our commitment to equity and serves to sustain our legacy of public service," National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said. "As old barriers for military service are being removed, the administration supports -- as a logical next step -- women registering for the Selective Service."

The White House emphasized that the administration remains committed to an all-volunteer military -- meaning women, like men, wouldn't be forced to serve unless there were a national emergency like a world war. Changing the policy would require an act of Congress, and there are no signs that lawmakers plan to move swiftly to alter the law.

The Defense Department echoed Obama's position, first reported by USA Today. Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter believes the inclusion of women throughout the military's echelons has strengthened the military's might.

"He thinks it makes sense for women to register for Selective Service, just as men must," Cook said.

Late last year, the Pentagon ordered all military jobs opened to women, including about 220,000 jobs previously restricted to men, including in special operations forces. Carter and other military leaders insisted that the military wouldn't lower the physical standards for those jobs to enable more women to qualify.

Guantanamo Prison

Among changes in the defense bill is the shrinking of the National Security Council from 400 to 200 members, a move aimed at limiting how much influence the White House has over policy operations of the State and Defense departments after former defense secretaries complained of "micromanagement."

The bill, crafted after weeks of talks between House and Senate negotiators, also prohibits Obama from following through on his long-standing campaign pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

During his 2008 bid for president, Obama pledged to close the detention facility at Guantanamo, which he called a recruiting tool for extremist groups. But Republicans and a number of Democrats repeatedly thwarted his goal over the ensuing years, arguing that the prison was badly needed for housing suspected terrorists. The ban on closing the prison also includes a prohibition on moving Guantanamo detainees to secure facilities in the U.S.

Trump not only pledged to keep Guantanamo open, but he also said during the campaign that he wants to "load it up with some bad dudes."

The defense legislation also authorizes a 2.1 percent pay raise for the troops -- a half-percentage-point higher than the Pentagon requested in its budget presentation. The Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, said it's the largest military pay increase since 2010.

The White House Office of Management and Budget objected to the larger raise, telling lawmakers earlier this year that the lower amount would save $336 million this fiscal year and $2.2 billion through 2021. A bigger increase, the budget office said, would upset the careful balance between competitive pay and acquiring cutting-edge equipment and training.

The bill blocks the Pentagon's planned reductions in the number of active-duty troops by prohibiting the Army from falling below 476,000 active-duty soldiers -- 16,000 more than Obama's defense budget had proposed. The bill also adds 7,000 service members to the Air Force and Marine Corps.

The bill would prevent the Pentagon from forcing thousands of California National Guard troops to repay enlistment bonuses and benefits they received a decade after they signed up to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers would have to return a bonus only if a "preponderance of the evidence" shows they knew they weren't eligible to receive the money.

The defense bill contains $5.8 billion in additional war-related funding Obama requested last month primarily for operations in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. That includes $2.5 billion to maintain elevated U.S. troop levels of 8,400 in Afghanistan as announced over the summer. About $383 million would pay for airstrikes against Islamic State militants.

The bill gives the administration expanded authority to ramp up national missile defense. It also moderately expands a program to provide visas to certain Afghan translators and interpreters who worked for the U.S. government mission in Afghanistan.

Information for this article was contributed by Karoun Demirjian and Juliet Eilperin of The Washington Post and by Richard Lardner and Josh Lederman of The Associated Press.

A Section on 12/03/2016

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