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Today, Congresswoman Veronica Escobar (TX-16) released the following statement on her first ever ‘no’ vote on the National Defense Authorization Act:

“Every year that I’ve been in Congress, I have helped craft and – even if the bill didn’t achieve all we worked on – voted in favor of the annual National Defense Authorization Act. Today, I voted against the FY24 NDAA.

"Unfortunately, despite a number of compromises made to ensure passage of a solidly bipartisan bill out of the House Armed Services Committee, the amendments added on the House floor this week have created a radically different bill. House Republicans took a carefully-crafted piece of legislation that put our national defense and servicemembers first, and turned it into a product of the extremism that has gripped their party. 

"The House FY24 NDAA is littered with amendments that attack the freedom, well-being, and support we should be ensuring for our servicemembers and their families. From the back-door effort to enact a national abortion ban, limits to basic health care, reversing investments to protect installations that are being impacted by the climate crisis, to a brazen reversal of efforts to address inequity, the FY24 NDAA in its current state bears no resemblance to the bipartisan legislation we passed out of the Armed Services Committee. Instead, this bill demonstrates what happens when Republican extremists are empowered by weak party leadership and given free reign to hijack a critical bipartisan tradition. The end result imperils our servicemembers and their families.

"This bill will intensify our recruitment and retention crisis, harm our military’s readiness at a time of great global turmoil, undermine our national defense and security, and strip freedoms from the very people fighting for ours.

"Our nation is strongest when those who serve and their families get the resources and respect they need and deserve. This piece of legislation in its current form isn’t just unworthy of support, but is an example of the dangers posed by political extremism.”