About $8.5 billion would be pumped into barracks maintenance, military health care and other service member quality-of-life initiatives under a massive funding bill being advanced by congressional Republicans.
The quality-of-life funding is part of the $150 billion for the Defense Department that Republicans are proposing in a wide-ranging bill they are working to push through along party lines to enact President Donald Trump's agenda. The defense portion of the bill was released over the weekend ahead of the House Armed Services Committee's debate on it, which is scheduled for Tuesday.
In addition to the quality-of-life funding, the legislation would inject billions of dollars into shipbuilding, military operations on the southern border and the Golden Dome, the nebulous idea for a new missile defense shield to protect the U.S. homeland.
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"America's deterrence is failing and without a generational investment in our national defense, we will lose the ability to defeat our adversaries," House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said in a statement Sunday. "With this bill, we have the opportunity to get back on track and restore our national security and global leadership."
The Pentagon funding is just a sliver of what Trump has declared will be a "big, beautiful bill" to cut taxes and beef up border security, among other priorities.
In order to pass the bill without needing Democratic support, Republicans are using a process known as reconciliation that will allow the bill to pass in the Senate with a simple majority rather than the 60-vote threshold needed for most legislation in the upper chamber.
While bulking up Pentagon spending typically attracts bipartisan support, other expected aspects of the bill are drawing fierce Democratic opposition. In particular, in order to help pay for tax cuts and increased Pentagon and border spending, Republicans are eying up to $1.5 trillion in government spending cuts.
Republicans have not unveiled detailed cuts, but Democrats maintain that level of downsizing will be impossible to reach without slashing popular social safety net programs such as Medicaid and the food assistance program known as SNAP.
"For over six decades, House Armed Services Democrats have stood proudly with our Republican colleagues in investing prudently in the greatest sources of America's strength: service members and their families, world-leading innovations, modernization and our continued commitment to allies and partners," Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement Sunday. "We can and should do this without requiring the most vulnerable among us to carry the burden of the costs on their backs."
Of the quality-of-life funding in the defense portion of the bill, about $1.3 billion would go toward barracks maintenance and restoration across the military services. The military has faced persistent problems with squalid living conditions for the military's most junior troops.
In addition to the barracks funding, the bill would also provide temporary authorization for more widespread barracks privatization, an idea that has gained steam in recent years as the services have struggled with maintenance backlogs.
The quality-of-life funding also includes $2 billion for defense health programs to "prevent shortages in the provision of health care services;" $2.9 billion for basic allowance for housing payments; $50 million for special pay and bonuses; $100 million for child-care fee assistance for service members; and $10 million for military spouse professional licensure fee assistance, according to the bill text and summary of the bill from the House Armed Services Committee.
The single biggest pot of money in the defense part of the bill is for shipbuilding at about $34 billion. Among the shipbuilding programs that would get extra funding are an extra Virginia-class submarine in fiscal 2027, two additional Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, San Antonio-class amphibious transport docks and America-class amphibious assault ships.
The bill would also set aside about $25 billion for various missile defense accounts with the intention of fulfilling Trump's vision for a layered missile defense system he is calling the Golden Dome, according to the bill summary. Republicans are proposing funding for the Golden Dome even though the Pentagon has yet to release specific plans for the program.
The Golden Dome funding in the bill would be used to "develop and deploy new space and terrestrial based capabilities to detect and interdict missiles, including hypersonic missiles bound for the homeland with kinetic and nonkinetic means," according to the bill summary.
Also in the bill is about $5 billion for U.S. military operations related to the border and immigration. Trump has deployed thousands of service members to the U.S.-Mexico border as part of his immigration crackdown, as well as used U.S. military aircraft to deport migrants and tapped military bases such as Guantanamo Bay to hold detained migrants.
The border funding in the Pentagon bill would cover "deployment of military personnel, operations and maintenance, counter-narcotics and counter-transnational criminal organization mission support, the operation of and construction in national defense areas, the temporary detention of migrants on Department of Defense installations, and the repatriation of persons in support of law enforcement activities," according to the bill text.
While the bill will not need Democratic support to pass, passage is not guaranteed as gaps persist between House and Senate Republicans on exactly how much government spending to cut and how to calculate the cost of tax cuts.
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