Washington, DC – Today, Congresswoman Julia Brownley (D-CA) issued the following statement in response to House passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2025:
“Funding our military to ensure its strategic readiness, to build and maintain our Armed Forces’ capabilities, to meet our global defense challenges, to support our service personnel and their families, as well as strengthen our ability to defend our country and democracy is typically a bipartisan exercise due to the extraordinary weight of this bill.
“Every year, we hear from my Republican colleagues that they are interested in good-faith negotiations and bipartisan compromise in order to reach these goals. Yet, for the second year in a row, Republicans have taken it upon themselves to commandeer the process in favor of political theater by including disastrous and poisonous provisions that are ideologically extreme and are an affront to our servicemembers.
“Our military cannot grow stronger when we include dangerous provisions that weaken the diversity of our Armed Forces by limiting the active participation of women and LGBTQ servicemembers.
“Republicans have launched an all-out assault on the reproductive rights of our servicemembers and their families and the rights of LGBTQ servicemembers. Sadly, the poison amendments added to the NDAA continues their ideological culture-war against our military personnel. While the original committee-passed bill was bipartisan and focused on supporting our servicemembers and their families, on the House floor we witnessed GOP extremists adopting numerous amendments that attacked women’s reproductive rights and eliminated access to basic health care for women and LGBTQ servicemembers. Instead of supporting all of our military personnel, Republicans have used this bill to promote an anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ agenda.
“As a representative of Naval Base Ventura County, I am also disappointed that the Republicans are using this bill to prevent military installations from addressing the harmful impacts of the climate crisis. Coastal bases, like NVBC, have long been dealing with the harmful impacts of sea level rise, which exacerbates coastal erosion and puts base infrastructure at risk of failure. Seawater intrusion into our aquifers also puts drinking water resources at risk. We cannot afford to bury our heads in the sand when it comes to the daily realities of climate change, and our military must prepare to address these impacts.
“Ultimately, I voted against the House version of the FY2025 NDAA, because I could not stand idly by while Republicans included dangerous provisions that demean and degrade our servicemembers and attack not only reproductive health care, but also make a pronounced assault on diversity and equality, in an effort to turn back the clock to a time when our military – and much of American society – was closed to women, LGBTQ people, and people of color.
“I trust that the Senate will produce a bipartisan bill that rejects these ideological, culture-war provisions, and I will work to ensure that the final FY2025 NDAA invests in our national defense, supports our servicemembers, and makes America and the world more secure.”
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Issues: 118th Congress, Military, National Security