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December 24, 2022

On Friday, President Joe Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2023 into law.  Conservative lawmakers like Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) — for whom the bill was formally named — and liberal lawmakers like Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) overwhelmingly supported it in the House and the Senate.

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The bill has much to like.  A summary provided by the aforementioned senators shows that it provides for the financial needs of servicemembers through pay raises and limited increased housing allowances and increases security cooperation with Taiwan to deter China.  It also includes a hard won victory by social conservatives to repeal the absurd and harmful COVID-19 vaccine mandate.  And The Heritage Foundation, known for its fiscal conservatism and its foreign policy hawkishness, praised the bill for being relatively focused on defense instead of unrelated political goodies and for removing gender identity language.

But as is normal when considering monstrous bills that come out of D.C., the good in the law may be outweighed by the bad, including but not limited to the following:

  • Over 8,000 servicemembers who objected to the vaccine’s moral compromises and risks were summarily dismissed from the military.  A Republican compromise means they will not be reinstated.
  • The budget itself is unnecessarily enormous.  The proper role of good government includes support for a strong military because without a functioning national defense, there’s no security for markets, businesses, and economic movement.  However, our country’s military spending leaks like a sieve.
  • There’s no accountability for those who use and abuse taxpayer dollars.
  • Abortion funding was left in.

What is the NDAA?

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Not to be confused with national defense appropriations, the NDAA is Congress’s formal authorization and direction for national defense spending.  However, it does not provide any funding — that comes under the appropriations budget, which is separately approved by Congress.  For decades, much of the funding has happened either as a standalone bill or as part of Continuing Resolutions, which Congress passes in short chunks to accommodate partisan backbiting and disagreements.

The NDAA is an important part of the federal budget because it provides the Pentagon and associated agencies (such as the Department of Energy, which was authorized for $30.3 billion in Fiscal Year 2023) direction and resource authority for spending money Congress will provide.

But just as eating is important to survival but can be abused, the NDAA is as bloated as some people’s waistlines.  And its priorities are often closer to what politicians want than what the nation needs…or even what the Pentagon says is necessary for national defense.

There are undoubtedly many technical areas where national defense experts could tell us where the NDAA was Goldilocks — authorizing exactly right, too much, or not enough to many critical components of national security.  As a free-market economist and practicing Catholic, my intention here is to examine the three straightforward areas laid out above.

Vaccine analysis

The good here is that the vaccine mandate is likely to be a thing of the past.  Valid concerns about COVID-19 resulted in dictator-style mandates that shoved experimental vaccines with morally questionable developments into people’s bodies…all for the sake of “health.”  And when patriotic servicemembers had legitimate moral, religious, and health concerns about the vaccines, thousands were told that those concerns were invalid for reasons of “good order and discipline.”