US Army personnel offload military equipment at the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base near Constanta in Romania on February 14, 2017. | Daniel Mihaileschu/Getty Images House passes $675B defense spending bill

The House easily passed $675 billion in defense spending Thursday after lawmakers tacked on provisions to bar the Pentagon from doing business with the Chinese telecom firms ZTE and Huawei and to pave the way for a dual purchase of aircraft carriers by the Navy.

The vote was 359-49, with 137 Democrats joining all but three Republicans to pass the fiscal 2019 defense appropriations bill.


The legislation would continue Republican-led efforts to build up the military. Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), who chairs the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, called the legislation the "next critical step" in boosting U.S. military might.

"The priorities funded in this bill not only stop the erosion, but also enable our military to restore and increase their competitive advantage," Granger said on the floor.

The House appropriators struck first in the annual defense appropriations process, breezing through just over 50 amendments in three days of debate.

The Senate Appropriations Committee is considering its version of the Pentagon funding bill Thursday. And Senate leaders are eyeing combining it with legislation funding labor, health and education programs to ease its consideration on the floor.

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Before passing its bill, the House adopted by voice vote an amendment from Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) to bar funding for the Pentagon to procure goods and services from ZTE and Huawei, which Democrats and Republicans alike have called a risk to national security.

"Time and time again, we have seen that these companies, along with many others, abuse and manipulate their placement in the market to attack sensitive American communications, the technology sector as a whole and our national critical infrastructure," Gallego said. "There is no disagreement on this point."

The Trump administration stirred up controversy earlier this month when it struck a deal with ZTE to lift sanctions on the company. And since then, lawmakers have sought to limit the companies, which have ties to the Chinese government. Defense policy legislation passed by the House and Senate contain varied bans on the Pentagon and other government agencies doing business with ZTE and Huawei.

But the mostly amicable floor debate dissolved into an outright food fight between appropriators and their Armed Services counterparts over a pair of costly shipbuilding proposals.

Appropriators beat back by a wide margin,144-267, an amendment from Reps. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) and Rob Wittman (R-Va.) to increase advance procurement funding for the Virginia-class submarine by $1 billion. The measure was aimed at pressing the Navy to build a third sub in each fiscal 2022 and 2023.

"We are losing submarines because we are not building them fast enough to replace the ones that are retiring," Wittman argued. "Are we willing to look at our children and grandchildren and tell them when we had a chance to do something, we didn't do it?"

Wittman and Courtney, who lead the House Armed Services Seapower Subcommittee, contended the measure is needed to build more subs faster. It drew opposition from both House appropriators and Pentagon brass. Opponents warned the proposal would eat into other shipbuilding programs and would stick the Navy with a bill in the billions of dollars when the subs are built.

The House, however, adopted another amendment from Wittman and Courtney, over appropriators' objections, to permit the Navy to procure two aircraft carriers simultaneously, mirroring the House-passed defense policy bill.

The bill would allocate $606.5 billion for base Pentagon spending and another $68.1 billion to fund U.S. war efforts through the Overseas Contingency Operations account.

The legislation most notably boosts funding to buy 93 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, 16 more than requested by the Pentagon, at a cost of $9.4 billion. Granger’s Fort Worth congressional district is home to the Lockheed Martin plant that builds the next-generation fighters.

The bill would also allocate $22.7 billion to build 12 new Navy ships, including three littoral combat ships, two more than requested.

The White House criticized appropriators for funding the extra ships and insisted one LCS in the coming year, when combined with three procured in each of the past two years, would keep shipyards in Wisconsin and Alabama humming until the Navy awards a contract for a replacement ship, known as the frigate.

The spending bill would also continue to grow the ranks of the military services by 15,600 active-duty and Reserve troops over this year. And it would fund a 2.6 percent troop pay raise, the largest in nearly a decade.

The bill would provide $623 million for the JSTARS recapitalization program, which the Air Force wants to cancel because it says the aging surveillance planes are ill-equipped to survive against adversaries like Russia and China with advanced air defenses. The administration has instead called for investing in the Advanced Battle Management System, a new follow-on to JSTARS.

The House also brushed aside administration objections to a provision that would fence funding for Pentagon cloud initiatives. It would restrict funding for both the so-called Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud initiative and the Defense Enterprise Office Solutions initiative until the Pentagon provides an acquisition plan to Congress.

Amid concerns the Pentagon plans to contract with just one company, that plan should include opportunities for multiple providers.