Congress Gets Something Right

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, December 11, 2025

 

Congress gets a lot of grief these days. Deservedly, too. No “buts” about it.

 

And yet, before the unsatisfying process of legislative compromise denudes its valuable gestures — before lawmakers meekly decline to pursue their prerogatives and defer in supine fashion to the executive branch, to unelected regulatory agencies, to podcasters and celebrities — the legislature sometimes gets things right. The House-passed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is, by and large, one of those things.

 

With nearly three-quarters of the House in support of the measure — including 197 Republicans and 115 Democrats — the lower chamber of Congress passed a measure that represents the most direct challenge to the White House’s unilateral authority to remake America’s relations with the world in years.

 

The FY26 NDAA would, if passed, prevent the administration’s revisionist elements from engineering the divorce with Europe they so plainly desire. It directs the Pentagon and European Command to “deepen security cooperation” with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — the so-called Baltic Security Initiative. It restricts the administration from drawing down U.S. personnel in Europe below 76,000 for more than 45 days. It proscribes the removal of major equipment and platforms from the theater. It prevents European Command from divesting real estate and abandoning its footprint on the continent. It preserves the postwar alliance structure ensuring that EUCOM’s commander and NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe will be the same person: forever an American. And it locks in the Pentagon’s support for Ukraine’s defense, authorizing the sale of $400 million for the manufacture of ordnance and platforms destined for the front lines.

 

In addition, the NDAA compels the executive branch to provide Congress with all but real-time intelligence about Moscow’s capabilities and its ongoing efforts to rebuild its forces. The defense bill treats Russia as a threat on par with China and North Korea — which makes sense, given the degree to which these anti-American powers are in league with one another. The bill compels Congress to conduct inquiries into joint defense and intelligence-sharing operations between our irredentist competitors abroad — information the administration will have to furnish.

 

The new NDAA is similarly protective of America’s force posture in East Asia. It establishes a floor of minimally 28,500 U.S. troops stationed permanently on the Korean Peninsula. It commits the United States to “vigorously support” Taiwan’s diplomatic initiatives, and it authorizes $1 billion annually to support Taipei’s defense — including the “fielding” of autonomous vehicles and anti-drone capabilities. The legislation commits the United States to joint maritime and leadership training missions between our two respective coast guards, and it emphasizes interoperability between the armed forces of not just the U.S. and Taiwan but also Japan, Australia, and the Philippines.

 

In appropriating $8 billion more than even the Pentagon requested, the NDAA provisions tens of billions for shipbuilding, munitions, and aircraft and ground-vehicle procurement. It would repeal the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Iraq while leaving the 2001 AUMF intact. It calls for a nearly 4 percent pay hike for many service personnel, and it funds improvements to housing and military base facilities.

 

In a sign of Congress’s willingness to pick a fight with the administration over its defense priorities, the bill goes so far as to withhold a quarter of Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget unless the Pentagon provides Congress with information relating to its strikes on alleged narcotics traffickers in the Caribbean. One provision compels the release of “unedited video of strikes conducted against designated terrorist organizations in the area of responsibility of the United States Southern Command” — a prospect at which the president has bristled.

 

If nothing else, this iteration of the NDAA is an antidote to the fundamentally unserious document the administration has dubiously retailed as a National Security Strategy.

 

That ideological fever dream dressed up as a national defense memorandum treats American foreign policy as an extension of domestic political conflict. That document explicitly rejects the U.S.-led world order — to which it sneeringly refers to as “permanent American domination of the entire world.” It elevates illegal immigration to a threat on par with the enemy action from hostile foreign powers, and it makes American social dynamics — “spiritual health,” the integrity of “traditional families,” and the like — into national security priorities. It goes soft on China, defines our only challenge in relation to Russia as Europe’s refusal to kowtow to it, and heaps theatrical scorn on America’s Western European partners. It had to be tough somewhere, so it picks a fight with America’s friends if not its adversaries.

 

In short, Trump’s National Security Strategy was a revolutionary document. It was, therefore, incumbent on the first branch of government to pump the brakes and impose some overdue caution on the revolutionaries who populate executive branch bureaucracies. Mirabile visu, the House has done just that. At least for now.

 

There may still be a bumpy road ahead for the NDAA. Like any legislative compromise, it has many detractors. Those Republicans who didn’t wholly object to the document’s recognition of America’s role in the world wanted it to prohibit the Federal Reserve from backing (and possibly monitoring) digital cryptocurrency. Although the NDAA doesn’t turn a blind eye to DEI, some on the right wanted to see a more aggressive rollback of “woke” initiatives in the Defense Department. Democratic holdouts insist that the document doesn’t go nearly far enough in imposing stricter oversight on the Trump administration. Others balked at the document’s failure to address the president’s deployment of National Guard troops to U.S. cities. Progressives wanted to see funding for in vitro fertilization for troops and a stronger push to unionize the Pentagon. These objections are likely to get a hearing in the Senate, but it is unlikely that the final product will depart dramatically from the NDAA’s currently desirable outlines.

 

Speaker Mike Johnson described the NDAA as an extension of Donald Trump’s agenda of “peace through strength.” We shall see if the president agrees. Still, the overwhelming support the measure has received in the House could convince him to quiet the concerns his inner circle will raise with a bill that represents a direct challenge to the policy of retrenchment on which some in Trump’s orbit insist. After all, that’s what Congress is supposed to do.