Disinterment of Remains of Fernando V. Cota From Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery, Texas

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I also support this bill. I thank Chairman Rogers, the committee staff, House and Senate. This has truly been a bipartisan process. I am not in love with everything in the bill. There are some other things I would have liked to have seen included, but I really compliment Chairman Rogers and the majority staff for having worked with us throughout that process and worked with the Senate. I thought we had a very good bicameral, bipartisan agreement this year.

The chairman is right. The highlight of this bill is acquisition reform, something that our committee has worked on for quite some time. For the last 2 years, in particular, we have been really focused on how to get this right, and this is the most ambitious swing at acquisition reform that we have taken. I know that can sound sort of dry. Acquisition reform doesn't exactly excite people, but it is really important because what it is about is getting the Pentagon to be able to buy the equipment, the innovative equipment, that it needs to adapt quickly so that our warfighters can have what they need to meet the challenges of the modern battlefield. It is way too slow right now, too many programs, way over budget, and not delivering as advertised.

Speeding up that process and delivering a better product is an enormous priority for this country to meet our national security needs, and this bill does that. The House really led on that, and I think it is really important.

There are other key aspects of this bill. We have others outside of the jurisdiction of the NDAA who are part of this, including Coast Guard reauthorization, Foreign Affairs reauthorization, and the intel community's reauthorization. Those are important to meet our national security needs, as well.

There is also a very important component on countering UAS domestically. The threat the drones pose to many of our military installations and other sensitive areas in the country is a real problem. This bill takes a step toward trying to address that. I am also very pleased that this bill does a meaningful job of trying to reassert some legislative authority, to truly be the coequal branch of government that we say we are.

We show strong support for Ukraine with $400 million in USAI. We blocked the President's misbegotten efforts to pull troops out of Eastern Europe in this moment and really reassert the ability of our committee to exercise oversight. We have a fence on the travel budget for Secretary Hegseth until he follows the law and releases the videos for all of the boat strikes that are going on right now in Latin America and also until he gets us the execute orders that by law he is supposed to get to us. We also have a requirement in here that if any senior-level military officer is going to be fired, Congress has to be notified and a reason has to be given.

Overall, I think this bill is a good balance of the interests of both sides, in the Senate and the House, as well. It is a good product that we should be supportive of.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Houlahan), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Military Personnel.

Mr. DAVIS of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, to the chair and the ranking member, I thank them for their work and their leadership that has gotten us here today. I also thank the ranking member for yielding time.

Mr. Speaker, I stand in strong support of the 2026 NDAA. It is an essential piece of legislation that underscores our commitment to ensuring that we uphold the safety and security of the American people.

The 2026 NDAA is a reflection of many of our priorities. When we talk about about priorities, especially in eastern North Carolina, I visited our child development center, and part of the funds we see in this bill are going to help Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. When I think about the work that is needed at Cherry Point, there are specific efforts in here that help this community through the Flightline Utility Modernization Project, as well.

Let me say what really is important, when we talk about affordability, is to see this 3.8 percent pay raise for the men and women who are serving us well. This is going to help them at the checkout counter. I stand in full support of this bill.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Jacobs), who is a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Elfreth), a member of the House Armed Services Committee.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Stansbury).
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, the first thing I will say is we have mentioned repeatedly ``acquisition reform,'' which is such a huge part of this bill and such a major undertaking. It took a long time. We held a lot of meetings with a lot of different defense contractors, think tanks, and former people at the Pentagon to really get an understanding of exactly what is going on so that we could fix it.

Mr. Speaker, ``fix it'' means moving faster and getting more innovative technologies more quickly. There are two people I will acknowledge. The staff on the House Armed Services Committee is outstanding. Collectively, I thank all of them. I cannot possibly name all of them, but I name Phil MacNaughton and Lynn Williams, who are the two members of the staff who worked on acquisition reform and worked on all of those nitty-gritty details that are very difficult to understand to help us produce such a great product. I publicly thank both of them for their incredible work on this issue.

Mr. Speaker, I do support this bill. That does not mean that I don't have concerns. I do.

The biggest concern I have is that the Pentagon, being run by Secretary Hegseth and by President Trump, has simply not been accountable to Congress or accountable to the law. I guess it started with Signalgate, when Secretary Hegseth put on an unsecure channel sensitive, classified information that could place our troops at risk.

The inspector general did a report on that. They concluded exactly that, that Secretary Hegseth had unnecessarily placed our troops at risk.

His response to this was to say: I am completely exonerated; no problem.

He didn't even try to fix it.

Also, this Pentagon, unlike any Secretary of Defense whom I have dealt with, simply has not given Congress the information we are supposed to receive and given us the ability to do the level of oversight that we are supposed to do.

Mr. Speaker, in this bill, I mentioned there are things that try to force that forward, and I think that is a positive step. It is not enough.

To begin with, it is in the law that you are supposed to transmit execute orders, when the White House tells the Pentagon what it wants to do, to Congress. It is in the law. Within 30 days, you have to do that. It is not really complicated. It is not a big deal. They just don't do it, and we have been asking over and over again. The lack of respect for the law out of this Pentagon is a huge problem.

Mr. Speaker, let's start with, actually, one other fact. It is the Department of Defense. It is not the Department of War. The law is very clear on that point. We passed a law that called it the Department of Defense.

Mr. Speaker, if you want to call it the Department of War, I think that is a god-awful idea for a whole bunch of different reasons, but okay; come back to Congress, and let's do it. They didn't do that. They just changed it because the law doesn't matter to them, and that has implications. It causes problems. We are supposed to do our oversight for a reason.

Some of those problems are borne out in a variety of different ways. We have the National Guard engaged in domestic law enforcement all across this country. They are not trained for that. They are not supposed to be doing it. It is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, and it is bad policy.

It also means that the National Guard can't do the job that we are actually paying them to do, which is to train servicemembers to be ready for the fight. They don't have any training dollars.

I met with the TAG, the Adjutant General, for the State of Washington, who told me that they are not able to train because all of that money is going to have our National Guard's members stay in hotel rooms all around Washington, D.C.; Memphis; Los Angeles; and New Orleans. That is something that shouldn't be happening. We should have greater accountability.

I am also concerned about this whole issue of merit. We have heard that we have to get rid of DEI because it undercuts merit, and yet we have generals, inspector generals, and judge advocate generals being fired all over the Pentagon without explanation, many of them clearly highly qualified people: C.Q. Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; General Haugh, who was the head of the Cyber Command and NSA Combined Command.

These are very talented people. Was that based on merit? There is no merit involved in that. That is about loyalty to Donald Trump. Laura Loomer shows up in the White House and says: I don't like this guy, and he is out.

If we are going to have merit, merit can't mean we are going to make sure that nobody who is not a straight, White man ever gets any possible advantage. That is not merit. That is a built-in bias that focuses on loyalty, not on ability.

I will also say, I don't love DEI programs. You can read anything I have had to say about this. I am concerned about the way it has been implemented.

The idea that we ought to work to make sure that every corner of our country is represented in our military, I support. And there has been bigotry, bias, racism, and sexism that has made that difficult.

We ought to try to undo that so that we can access all of the talent in this country. Saying that we are going to get rid of all of that in favor of merit that just happens to focus on people who are blindly loyal to Pete Hegseth and President Trump, that is not merit.

I should clarify, I am not opposed to DEI programs. I am opposed to bad DEI programs--we ought to excise those--but we don't do enough here, I think, to correct those problems as we move forward.

I am saving the worst for last: stumbling into wars. Why does all that stuff matter, accountability, oversight, the people's House having a say in all this? It is because that way we don't stumble into bad decisions. We are about to do that. We have already done that in Latin America right now. We have launched a war against narco-terrorists.

President Trump ran on wanting to stop endless wars. You talk about an endless war, treating every single person who is a drug trafficker as a legitimate target for killing is an endless war and a war without authorization or proper legal authority. That lack of accountability and that lawlessness has consequences.

Now, as someone mentioned, we are hearing that we have seized a Venezuelan oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. The President has spoken frequently about his desire for regime change in Venezuela. That should not be happening. That is not the policy that we should be headed toward. We shouldn't be wanting to go back to the 19th century where powerful countries simply took what they could, and there was no international law.

I have a lot of things that I am concerned about. This bill, even if we did it perfectly, could not fix all of that. The reason I want people to vote for this bill is because we need to reassert the authority of Congress. That whole string side of things that I just listed that we are concerned about, one of the biggest things about that is that Congress needs to exist. We need to be a coequal branch. We need to do our job.

President Trump puts us in a fiendishly difficult position. He disregards us, abuses us, does all this other stuff. Then, if we pass a bill, eventually he has to sign it. It is like, well, should we do that? Yet, if we don't, then we are completely out of the picture.

I will give a sincere compliment and thank you to Chairman Rogers. He worked with us in a legitimate bipartisan way on this bill. There are things that are not in this bill that Republicans wanted in the bill. We got those out because we wanted a bipartisan product. This is a bipartisan product.

This starts moving us in the right direction. Does it stop all those bad things that President Trump and Pete Hegseth are doing right now? No. But it really couldn't. It is a step in the right direction toward reasserting the authority of Congress, which is but one step along a very long road, I will grant you, to try to get some restraint on the lack of transparency, the unaccountability, and the problems that are coming out of this White House and this Department of Defense that is creating all of these problems.

I hope we will vote for this bill, and I hope we will continue working to do more oversight of the Pentagon going forward.

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