The 2027 National Defense Authorization Act passed the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday, calling for $1.15 trillion in defense spending.
The committee passed the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with a 44-12 vote, according to the bill’s amendment tracker. The act had over 900 amendments proposed as it moved through Congress, according to the House Armed Services Committee.
The bill must still pass the full House, clear the Senate, be reconciled into a final version approved by both chambers and then be signed by the president, or enacted over a veto by two-thirds votes in both chambers in order to become a law.
The bill authorizes “$1.15 trillion in discretionary funds” while working to meet the final “topline investment of $1.5 trillion in FY27,” Republican House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said on Friday, according to the House Armed Services Committee.
The bill is separate from another $350 billion in “mandatory funding,” according to the fiscal 2027 budget. This additional spending with the $1.15 trillion would combine to meet the stated $1.5 trillion topline goal.
The authorization was initially announced with formal bipartisan backing from both Rogers and Democratic ranking member Adam Smith.
Rogers, Smith, the Pentagon and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“If you really want to fix readiness and deterrence stop getting involved in wars of choice, like in Iran,” Ben Freeman, the director of Democratizing Foreign Policy at The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “They do nothing to advance American interests, cost us blood and treasure, and make us less prepared for any real future threats. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure here. After that, we should stop playing the same game over and over again where we rely on prime contractors who over-promise and under-deliver.”
Not all experts were critical of the proposed spending increase.
“I think it’s unquestionably heading in the right direction, and that you do need significantly more funding to address the challenges we have with our defense industrial base right now, and what the US military needs given the current security environment,” Joe Costa, the director of the Forward Defense Program at the Atlantic Council, told the DCNF.
“We’re revitalizing the defense industrial base and rebuilding our capacity to produce the capabilities our military needs,” Rogers said on Thursday in his opening statement at the committee meeting.
‘Integrate The U.S. And Israeli Militaries’
The bill retained a proposal to integrate the U.S. and Israeli militaries in section 224 under the title “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.” Section 224 would link U.S. military-related manufacturing, military technology development and promote wider “integration” between the two countries.
Democratic California Rep. Ro Khanna proposed an amendment under LOG 6897 to strike Section 224. The amendment failed by “voice vote,” according to the amendment tracker.
“Section 224 is the worst amendment I’ve seen in an NDAA in years, perhaps ever,” Freeman told the DCNF. “It paves the way for an unprecedented integration of the U.S. and Israeli military industrial complexes. Worse yet, it would give the Israeli government an even greater stranglehold on American politics.”
“Marrying the US military more tightly to Israel’s is a mistake,” Defense Priorities Policy Director Benjamin H. Friedman told the DCNF. “We should move in the opposite direction.”
Battleships, Nukes and Accountability
Section 101 in the bill included $1 billion for the Trump-Class Battleship. House Democrats led by Smith failed to kill the additional funding for the battleship with a 26-30 vote on amendment LOG 6087, according to the amendment tracker.
The U.S. Navy has announced that the first Trump-Class Battleship will be named the USS Defiant (BBG 1) if completed, according to a U.S. Navy press release from Dec. 22, 2025.
“The $1.5 trillion topline is an egregious waste of taxpayer dollars,” Freeman told the DCNF. “This would be the largest military budget since World War II, even when controlling for inflation. It’d be nearly double the height of the Reagan military build up and far more than we spent at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when we had more than 100,000 troops deployed to conflict zones.”
Section 4701 in the NDAA calls for increased spending on nuclear weapons programs. In total, $27.6 billion was proposed for National Nuclear Security Administration weapons activities.
“I think that’s positive,” Costa told the DCNF. “We’re seeing our adversaries develop and modernize their nuclear forces, and I think that we need to do the same.”
The U.S. military will still likely lack key munitions for several years, regardless of the new funding.
The U.S. military has used somewhere between 45% and 61% of its Patriot missiles and between 52% and 80% of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) munitions since the Iran war began, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies report. It can take up to 53 months for THAAD interceptors to be produced, while Patriots have an average delivery time of 42 months.
“It depends, however, in general, for the higher-end munitions…a key vulnerability tends to be the supplier base, and even with significant money, it will still take significant time for those suppliers to build enough capacity to meet demand,” Costa told the DCNF.
One successful amendment to the NDAA proposed by Democratic New York Rep. Pat Ryan requires the Pentagon to notify Congress within five days with cause when senior military officers are fired or dismissed.
The amendment passed with a “voice vote” and states that the Pentagon must tell Congress why any flag officer with a grade above O-8 is removed through “a report in writing that describes the performance, concerns, actions, or inactions of that officer that are cause for such removal, transfer, or relief of duty,” according to LOG 6771.
“This is the real problem: there is absolutely no threat that justifies this enormous increase in military spending…this proposed increase alone would be more than any other country in the world—including China—is spending on its military. It would be nearly as much as China, Russia, and Iran are spending on their militaries combined,” Freeman told the DCNF. “And, for what? The Iran war has made the U.S. less, not more, safe. It’s raised everyone’s gas prices and put small businesses all across the nation out of business. How is any of that helping the American people?”
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Republished with permission from Daily Caller News Foundation
