House Armed Service Committee (HASC) Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) on Wednesday morning laid out two potential methods for passing in the National Defense Authorization Act: either Congress can override President Barack Obama’s veto or pass a new version of the NDAA.
A new bill would be written to reflect the $5 billion difference between the original $412 billion NDAA and the $407 billion amount allocated to defense by the Bipartisan Budget Agreement, he told reporters. If Senate and House leaders choose to go ahead with the Nov. 5 override, lawmakers would have to approve a second vehicle that slashes $5 billion from the original bill.
“We are certainly in the ballpark of enough votes to override the veto. Most of the Republicans who had voted against [the bill] have said that they would vote to override, and I have personally had conversations with Democrats who would vote to override,” he said. “There are some people who want to use the override route followed by a second bill to adjust the tables.”
Changing the date of the override vote or eliminating the plan to hold the vote would also require a bit of congressional maneuvering, he noted. The House would either have to pass a rule or get unanimous consent to do that.
HASC will working with its Senate counterpart and the appropriations committees to trim away $5 billion from the bill. The committees have not yet decided what will be cut, but those reductions “will matter” because there is already so little fat in the bill, Thornberry said.
Defense acquisition and retirement reform provisions will stay the same, he said. “I don’t see that anything changes in this year’s NDAA other than changing the tables to reflect the $5 billion difference in what the congressional budget was and what this agreement is.”
Thornberry took Obama to task for the budget agreement’s increase of wartime spending to pay for base budget expenses–the “spending gimmick” the president said was one of the causes of his veto of the NDAA last week. However, the HASC chairman allowed the two-year deal would give his committee more stability when drafting the 2017 defense authorization bill.
“We basically know what number to mark to next year, and that enables us to focus even more on acquisition reform next steps, on TRICARE reform … and to do our oversight,” he said, adding that the $59 billion Overseas Contingency Operations number may need to be increased depending on the situation in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.