Defense Bill Standoff: Congress Risks Ending 65-Year NDAA Streak as $1.15 Trillion Fight Drags Toward Thanksgiving

For 65 consecutive years, Congress has passed an annual defense authorization bill, through wars, shutdowns, divided government and bitter election seasons. That streak is now in genuine doubt. The fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, known as the NDAA, is stalled between the two chambers, and negotiators are hoping that the weeks after the November 3 midterm elections will produce a deal in time for Thanksgiving. Nothing about that outcome is settled, and the midterm results themselves remain undecided, with voters still to have their say.

The NDAA is often described as must-pass legislation, but that label can mislead. The bill authorizes defense policy and programs: it sets the Pentagon’s priorities, approves pay raises for troops, authorizes weapons purchases and shapes military construction and personnel rules. It does not itself spend the money. Separate appropriations bills provide the actual funding. Even so, the authorization has become the main vehicle through which Congress exercises oversight of the military, and its annual passage has been treated for decades as a basic test of whether the two parties can still govern on national security.

This year’s bill is the largest in American history. The administration has sought about $1.15 trillion in defense authorization, with a further $350 billion proposed through a third budget reconciliation package, which would bring the combined total to about $1.5 trillion. Democrats in both chambers have pushed back, reportedly seeking hundreds of billions of dollars in spending reductions and greater congressional oversight of military operations. Republicans have defended the topline as necessary for a military that is fighting a war, rebuilding munitions stockpiles and modernizing weapons systems at the same time.

The House acted first, and only narrowly. The House Armed Services Committee approved its version of the bill 44-12 in June, with only about half of the committee’s Democrats supporting it. The full House then passed the legislation 216-212 on July 22, with six Democrats voting in favor and seven Republicans voting against. It was one of the thinnest margins for a defense bill in recent memory, and a sign that the old bipartisan coalition behind the NDAA had already frayed before the bill ever reached the Senate. Reporting at the time also noted that House Republicans had attached the legislation to a voting measure backed by the administration, a move Democrats cited as a further obstacle to a bipartisan final product.

The Senate proved to be the harder chamber. On July 14, Senate Democrats blocked their chamber’s version of the bill, and a procedural vote to advance it failed 50-46, ten votes short of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, voted against advancing the bill for procedural reasons, a standard move that preserves his right to bring the measure back to the floor for reconsideration. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, called the Democrats’ opposition unprecedented. Since that vote, the Senate has taken no further procedural step toward floor consideration of its version.

At the center of the Senate standoff is the war with Iran. Democrats have criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to launch military operations on February 28 without congressional authorization, and they have sought restrictions on future strikes against Tehran, along with fuller information about the conflict’s cost, mission and endgame. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York has argued that Democrats would not treat consideration of the defense bill as business as usual while the administration continued the conflict without congressional approval. Republicans, by contrast, have argued that the spending is essential precisely because the military is engaged in the war, and that withholding the annual authorization would weaken the armed forces in the middle of a conflict.

The price of that war has become a central fact in the debate. Pentagon figures reported by Stars and Stripes put the cost of the Iran war at about $47.1 billion as of October 16, an increase of about $3.5 billion from the roughly $43.6 billion reported in early September. About $29 billion of the total is attributed to replacing expended munitions, about $6.1 billion to replacing lost equipment, and about $11.9 billion to other operational costs, including support for deployed service members. The estimate does not include the cost of repairing American military bases damaged by Iranian missile and drone strikes, a figure the Pentagon has said it is still assessing. The October figure is also well above the $37.5 billion that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cited to lawmakers in July, and above the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of about $38 billion in Defense Department costs through August 1, with additional costs of $2 billion to $3 billion for each month the fighting continues.

The human cost has been invoked alongside the financial one. Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on October 28 that 21 American service members had been killed and more than 850 wounded since the war began, according to Stars and Stripes. The administration has continued to defend the operation as necessary, and the president has said the fight will be wrapped up soon while demanding a nuclear guarantee from Tehran. Those competing characterizations, one emphasizing sacrifice and cost and the other emphasizing the mission’s purpose, have made the NDAA debate a proxy for the wider argument about the war itself.

Other provisions have added to the friction. Democrats have objected to a House provision that would substantially expand military technology cooperation between the United States and Israel, at a time when many in the party have called for a reassessment of American support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The administration’s push to formally rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War has also drawn Democratic opposition. And the defense bill has long attracted unrelated policy riders, on subjects from social policy to voting rules, that complicate the search for a final compromise. Each addition gives one side a reason to walk away, even when both sides agree on the core need to authorize the military.

Defense budget specialists outside Congress have warned that the breakdown matters beyond this year’s bill. Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense budget expert at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Hill that the politics between the two branches were absolutely dismal, and warned that once red lines are crossed, it is difficult to go backward. She said she feared that the necessary and bipartisan NDAA was fragile in this new era, while hoping she was wrong. The warning reflects a concern that if the streak ends, future defense bills will be negotiated not as bipartisan exercises but as partisan contests, with each side treating the authorization as leverage for unrelated demands.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has stressed the urgency of passing the legislation, telling Punchbowl News that it was very important, that the country was living in very dangerous times, and that lawmakers had to come together and get it done. That urgency has not yet translated into agreement. With both chambers in recess ahead of the elections, there is no scheduled vote that would break the impasse before voters decide the makeup of the next Congress. The Senate is not expected to return to legislative business until November 9, for a lame-duck session that will run into December.

What failure would actually mean is less dramatic than a military shutdown, but still significant. Existing authorizations and appropriations would keep the armed forces operating, but new programs could not start, planned pay raises for more than a million active-duty troops could be delayed, and modernization efforts, from missile defense to drone programs, would lose their legislative foundation. The Pentagon would also lose the policy direction Congress normally supplies each year, from rules on housing and childcare to limits on troop levels in Europe and support for allies. In past years, Congress has sometimes passed the NDAA weeks after the October 1 start of the fiscal year; since fiscal 1977, enactment has come an average of about 45 days after the fiscal year began. A delay, in other words, is not unprecedented. A complete failure to pass the bill would be.

The calendar now dominates the strategy. According to The Hill, negotiators hope to resolve the outstanding disagreements after the November midterms, targeting completion by Thanksgiving. That timeline depends on two unknowns. The first is the election result itself: polls have pointed in different directions in different races, and polls are not results, so neither party can plan with certainty about who will control the House and Senate in January. A shift in control would change the negotiating leverage of both sides, and could either accelerate a deal, as lawmakers rush to finish business under the current majorities, or complicate it, as the outgoing majority loses its incentive to compromise.

The second unknown is whether the substantive gaps can actually be closed. Democrats want spending cuts and war restrictions. Republicans want to defend the $1.15 trillion topline and keep the bill free of constraints they see as tying the president’s hands during a war. The reconciliation package, worth a further $350 billion, remains unresolved as well, and a separate supplemental request for war-related expenses, variously reported at $67 billion for the Pentagon and $95 billion across the government, has also stalled. Any final deal would have to reconcile the House and Senate versions, survive votes in both chambers, and win the president’s signature, all within a lame-duck session crowded with unfinished funding bills and a December 11 government funding deadline.

For now, the 65-year streak survives on paper, but not on the legislative calendar. The House has passed its bill. The Senate has not. The negotiators have a target, Thanksgiving, but not yet an agreement. And the voters, who will decide the next Congress on November 3, have not yet spoken. If the streak ends, it will not be because Congress forgot how to pass a defense bill. It will be because, for the first time in 65 years, the two parties could not agree on what that bill should say, or what war it should authorize, at a moment when both the price and the politics of national security have rarely been higher.

Sources

USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from Newsmax, Channel News Asia and The Media Line.