Ndaa

Floor Speech

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Mr. TUBERVILLE. Madam President, I rise today to highlight some of the major victories that were included in the Senate's version of the NDAA--the military budget--that passed out of the Senate Armed Services Committee almost 6 months ago.

The Senate's version of this year's NDAA includes some excellent provisions, including a 4.5-percent pay raise for America's military servicemembers. This is a pay raise for the boots on the ground, not the top brass at the Pentagon. We secured powerful, new security initiatives in the Indo-Pacific. We secured provisions that advance our counter unmanned aircraft systems technologies.

Among the Senate's NDAA victories, I also count my amendments, which will help focus the Pentagon on its stated mission of deterring war and ensuring our Nation's security. One of these amendments includes slashing all funding for the woke diversity, equity, and inclusion policies at the DOD. Another amendment prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars for any costs associated with funding gender transition surgeries.

We need a military that is 100-percent focused on protecting our country and enhancing our national security, not implementing a woke agenda. Our military is not a social experiment. It should be a lethal fighting force, feared by our enemies and made up of our best and brightest in this country, which is why I applaud the work of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Ranking Member Wicker's leadership for putting together this excellent piece of legislation. The Senate's version of the NDAA received bipartisan support in committee, getting 22 of the 25 votes. You seldom see Republicans and Democrats come together like this.

So I ask: Why has Senator Schumer not brought this to the floor for the past 6 months? Why has the Senator from New York put a stop to good-faith efforts on setting our military up for success in the future? If Senator Schumer really cared about our military, he would have brought the NDAA up for a vote almost 6 months ago, but instead, we have been prioritizing liberal judges for the final weeks he has left as majority leader. Senate Democrats are more interested in burning taxpayer dollars on an unwinnable war in Ukraine than passing our military's budget.

Sadly, we have seen this time and time again: leadership that would rather cater to the woke administration than ensure our military is a lethal fighting force. But putting a woke agenda over our national security is nothing new to this administration. No institutions, not even our great military, are safe from being taken over by the Biden regime's radical woke policies.

Immediately after taking the White House, President Biden began to weaponize the DOD, using it as another tool in the administration's arsenal to further its progressive agenda. One of the Biden administration's first moves was to mandate the divisive diversity, equity, and inclusion training at the DOD--picking up right where Barack Obama left off 4 years earlier.

On day 1, the Biden administration announced that the military would begin conducting training to ``have knowledge of systemic and institutional racism and bias against underserved communities.'' This hateful ideology has no place in the United States, let alone the U.S. military.

This is supposed to be the No. 1 fighting force in the world. It is dangerous and insulting to waste our troops' valuable time on political indoctrination such as this. We need a lethal killing machine to deter aggression from our adversaries. I want our military focused on protecting Americans and our national security in an increasingly dangerous world, not on all of these woke DEI initiatives. There is no place for it, and Americans want to fund the military to achieve this objective. That is what our taxpayers pay money for, which is why on November 5, nearly 77 million Americans joined me in taking a stand to say: Enough of this nonsense.

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