The final text of the U.S. Congress’s annual defense policy bill contains an interesting mix of bipartisan pushback against some of the Trump administration’s efforts to unilaterally restructure U.S. military force posture around the world while skirting congressional oversight.
The compromise text for the $900 billion defense authorization measure was released late Sunday following months of bipartisan negotiations between the House and Senate. It is expected to be voted on and cleared for U.S. President Donald Trump to sign within the next two weeks.
The final text of the U.S. Congress’s annual defense policy bill contains an interesting mix of bipartisan pushback against some of the Trump administration’s efforts to unilaterally restructure U.S. military force posture around the world while skirting congressional oversight.
The compromise text for the $900 billion defense authorization measure was released late Sunday following months of bipartisan negotiations between the House and Senate. It is expected to be voted on and cleared for U.S. President Donald Trump to sign within the next two weeks.
The legislation’s top line is more than $8 billion higher than what the White House requested be spent on defense for fiscal 2026, which began in October.
But the 3,086-page bill would also limit the U.S. Defense Department from cutting deployed troops in Europe below 76,000 or from giving up the role of commander of all NATO military operations, a position known as “Supreme Allied Commander Europe,” without first complying with certain certification requirements to Congress, including affirming the actions wouldn’t impair the military alliance’s “defense and deterrent posture against current and future Russian aggression, as well as the security of NATO as a whole.”
Similarly, the legislation would impose constraints on the department’s ability to reduce deployed U.S. troops in South Korea below 28,500 or to transition wartime command of the U.S.-South Korean combined forces to the South Korean military.
The bipartisan restrictions follow months of mounting worries on Capitol Hill that lawmakers and European and Asian allies were being kept out of the loop on Defense Department plans to restructure and reduce U.S. troop deployments, including through ending a rotational brigade in Romania.
Other examples of the bipartisan pushback in the bill include:
- A requirement for any removal of a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before the end of their statutorily mandated term to be justified to Congress in writing.
- The denial of funds for modifications or consolidations of geographic combatant commands absent detailed explanations of how the changes will impact U.S. national security in such areas as counterterrorism operations, crisis response operations, freedom of navigation, joint trainings with allies, and great-power deterrence.
- Slapping U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office with a fine in the form of fencing off 25 percent of its travel budget until the secretary provides his congressional overseers with all overdue quarterly reports that cover “execute orders” issued by Hegseth or military commanders. Specifically, the congressional armed services committees are demanding that they be provided with “unedited videos of strikes” conducted against designated terrorist entities in the Western Hemisphere, a reference to the administration’s ongoing lethal missile strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean.
The legislation also finally repeals the 1991 and 2002 authorizations for use of military force (AUMFs) against Iraq. The termination of the AUMFs has long been sought by both progressive and isolationist lawmakers who contend they can be abused by the executive branch to justify military operations far afield from their initial congressional intent to authorize military campaigns against the long-toppled Saddam Hussein regime. For example, during his first administration, Trump cited the 2002 AUMF to justify the targeted killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Suleimani in early 2020.
Notably, the defense policy bill released by the Republican-led Congress continues to use the previously statutorily established titles of “Secretary of Defense” and “Department of Defense,” most likely a compromise in the face of strong Democratic opposition to codifying Trump and Hegseth’s preferred nomenclature of secretary of war and Department of War.
The defense policy legislation is a traditionally important signal of evolving congressional priorities, and while it establishes yearly U.S. military funding levels, the actual appropriation of money is done by separate spending legislation. That latter measure remains bogged down amid partisan fighting over just how deeply to allow the administration to cut domestic spending and to ignore previous congressional spending directives.
This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage of the Trump administration. Follow along here.
