Servicemember Quality of Life Improvement and National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025

Floor Speech

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Mrs. LUNA. Madam Chair, I support this amendment. The Department of Defense should not be giving money to propaganda machines. In fact, the only money that should be going from the Department of Defense anywhere is to lethality, not organizations ticked off that a conservative from Ohio might be calling out different branches for their focus on DEI or CRT or a movement that is basically alienating conservatives and pushing conservatives outside of its ranks.

I think there are a lot of Members who speak on these bills who are not servicemembers or have no experience with the Department of Defense. Honestly, we in this governing body are not going to allow a wokification of the Department of Defense.

Frankly, with the near-peer threat that we have in the future, I think that it is increasingly important that we focus again on lethality and not woke nonsense. It has no business in the NDAA.
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Mrs. LUNA. Mr. Chair, my amendment would prohibit CRT training for employees of the Department of Defense or members of the Air Force.

The primary focus of our military should be mission readiness and lethality. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have continued to push for diversity, equity, and inclusion to the deficit of our servicemen and -women.

Divisive ideologies like CRT have no place in our military. Our servicemembers should be learning the critical and often lifesaving skills that help them and their fellow servicemembers stay alive when they are deployed rather than having training hours diverted to forced CRT and race-based training.

As a veteran, I know firsthand that our servicemembers are not concerned about CRT training or DEI in the military. In fact, our servicemembers care about the skills and qualifications that prepare them for war.

When servicemembers are wounded, they do not care about how diverse their medics are; they care that the medics responding to them in their time of need are qualified and trained with the skills to keep them alive.

It is beyond time we stop prioritizing CRT and other divisive ideologies that are weakening our military and putting our Nation's security at risk.

We will gut CRT from our Nation's military with this NDAA. We are one Nation, one people, and this majority body believes in unity over division and merit over identity.

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Mrs. LUNA. Mr. Chair, to say that the military isn't actively doing this is misleading.

In fact, I personally have seen training that our servicemembers, including my husband, have had to go through.

To put it in perspective, my husband, before he got out of the military, was made to write down the top five people he associated with, writing down their race, sexual orientation, and gender. If those people were not diverse enough, he was then racist.

Well, I have news for my colleagues across the aisle. When you have men and women deploying around the country, serving with Black and Brown people, because that is apparently what we are going to talk about in regards to color around the world, and you are telling them that they are racist, even though they have laid down their lives for these people, I think that just shows how out of touch this governing body is.

To say that our military is not being forced to do that is misleading. They absolutely are. When I talk to men and women, both enlisted and at the officer level, I can tell you that they are more concerned about what is happening in the Pacific and what is happening in Russia than the infighting and the constant name-calling and also the wokification of our military.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mrs. LUNA. Mr. Chair, I yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mills).

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Mrs. LUNA. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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