The House on Friday approved a $688.3 billion authorization bill for the Department of Defense (DoD) that includes key provisions led by U.S. Reps. Patrick Meehan, Glenn “GT” Thompson and Bill Shuster, all Republicans representing Pennsylvania, which would strengthen public health security and U.S. missile defense.
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2018 would increase defense spending by 10 percent from last year’s level and exceeds the president’s request for essential readiness recovery by $28.5 billion. The measure also includes $24.3 billion to support aviation readiness, naval presence, facility maintenance, missile defense and ground forces.
“The United States government’s single greatest responsibility and constitutional duty is to provide for the defense of the nation,” Shuster, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said. “This year’s NDAA shows Congress’s commitment to this responsibility by beginning to repair the readiness crisis facing our troops after six years of slashing the DoD’s budget at a time when our enemies and threats have been expanding.”
Shuster introduced an amendment to the NDAA that would prevent the previous administration’s Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) initiative from moving forward.
“When you close a depot or base, you can’t snap your fingers and bring it back, and that leaves us vulnerable if we don’t have what we need to meet new threats,” Shuster said. “The world has become more dangerous, and now is not the time to start closing bases through BRAC, a process that still hasn’t been proven to provide tangible cost savings and which Secretary of Defense (James) Mattis still expresses uncertainty.”
Additionally, the entire text of Shuster’s bill, the Patriot Inventory Protection Act, H.R. 1916, was included in the NDAA. The provision would prevent the Army from unloading its inventory of Patriot GEM-T missiles, which Shuster said leads to increased work for Letterkenny Army Depot in his district in Pennsylvania and increased protection for American soldiers overseas.
An amendment authored by Meehan to allow the secretary of defense to work with local communities to screen the groundwater surrounding military bases for toxic compounds found in fire extinguishing foams was also included in the NDAA.
So-called PFOS/PFOA chemicals have been found in wells used for drinking water in a number of communities stemming from the use of certain firefighting foams at the former Naval Air Station-Joint Reserve Base in Willow Grove and the Naval Air Warfare Center in Warminster.
“Residents in the communities surrounding these installations have been exposed to these compounds for decades,” Meehan said. “These families deserve to know how years of ingesting these compounds has affected their health, and comprehensive screenings will give them and their doctors invaluable information about possible future complications. These families ingested these compounds through no fault of their own, and they shouldn’t be on the hook for the screenings needed to determine the extent of their exposure.”
The NDAA also includes a measure authored by Thompson to allow the secretary of defense to use existing funds to collaborate with medical researchers and universities on Lyme disease and other tick-born diseases.
“Pennsylvania has experienced an increase in tick-borne illnesses — such as Lyme disease,” Thompson said. “In fact, data from 2015 shows that the Commonwealth had the greatest incidence of tick-borne illnesses in the nation.”
While the Army Public Health Center operates a tick testing program, the tests by the program are limited to just six tick-borne illnesses though there at least 10 others, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More research will save lives, Thompson said, adding that the bipartisan amendment was cosponsored by U.S. Rep. Bill Keating (D-MA).