The U.S. Senate has voted to pass the fiscal 2024 defense policy bill, sending the $886.3 billion National Defense Authorization Act for House consideration on Thursday.
“On Wednesday, the Senate passed the mammoth $886 billion 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which funds the Pentagon and military spending in other government agencies.
The bill passed in a vote of 87-13, with six Democrats, five Republicans, and one Independent voting against it. This NDAA now heads to the House, where it’s expected to pass in a vote on Thursday as the bill is the version that the two chambers negotiated.
The NDAA includes an amendment to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which gives the FBI the power to conduct warrantless spying of foreign targets and Americans they interact with. The sweeping surveillance tool is set to expire at the end of the year, but the extension pushes it back to April 19th.
A bipartisan group of senators tried to strip the Section 702 extension from the NDAA, but their efforts failed. For procedural reasons, only 41 senators were needed to remove the provision, but only 35 supported it”. -Dave DeCamp, Antiwar
While the National Defense Authorization Act does extend a measure to help Kiev, the amount of funding the bill authorizes for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative is minuscule relative to the $61 billion in assistance for Ukraine that the White House had asked Congress to approve.