Servicemember Quality of Life Improvement and National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. BANKS. Mr. Chair, this is a strong NDAA, and I urge my colleagues to support it. It includes many important priorities that are essential to protecting our national security. It remains must-pass legislation to care for our servicemembers and their families.
There are enormous wins in this bill for our servicemembers and their families, starting with a 19.5 percent pay raise for junior enlisted servicemembers. It increases access to specialty medical care, expands childcare programs to reduce wait lists across the country, and ensures our servicemembers receive 100 percent of their housing costs for their basic allowance for housing.
We must continue, as well, to gut the woke bureaucracy at the DOD. This bill does that. It contains many provisions, including a requirement that all military personnel actions are based on merit without regard to race, color, sexuality, or your political views.
There is a ban in this bill on affirmative action at our service academies. By the end of this week, I expect this bill will also include more important provisions, like a hiring freeze on all DEI personnel, a ban on overpaid chief diversity officers, and a complete ban on funding for critical race theory across the DOD.
This bill builds on the foundation of last year's NDAA, curtailing the impact that this administration's woke leftist policies can have on our troops. As we have seen just this week with the Air Force in Korea authorizing the wearing of Pride patches on Air Force uniforms or how a DoDEA school in Bahrain honored a known anti-Semite and activist on their Facebook page, DEI and leftist politics in the Biden Pentagon are still firmly entrenched. We must do something about it.
Mr. Chairman, this bill is a huge step forward in supporting servicemembers and their families. It is our promise that they receive the pay and benefits necessary to focus on their mission and that their children are cared for and well educated. We can't do enough to make sure that that happens, but this bill goes a long way to do it.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source