On May 15, the House passed, 269-151, the FY2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) (H.R. 1735). The House Armed Services Committee approved the legislation on April 29 (see The Source, 5/1/15).
According to the committee report, the measure would authorize $620.152 billion in mandatory and discretionary funds for the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Energy (DoE), as well as for overseas contingency operations (OCO). This amount includes discretionary funding of $496.106 billion for DoD, $18.856 billion for atomic energy defense programs at DoE, and $89.239 billion for OCO.
Also included in the base authorization for DoD is $136.443 billion for military personnel, $7.151 billion for military construction, which includes $1.413 billion for family housing, and $31.735 billion for the Defense Health Program.
The legislation contains several provisions relating to the prevention of, and response to, military sexual assault (pp. 165-168), including provisions to prohibit retaliation against individuals who report sexual assault or intervene on behalf of a sexual assault victim, standardize training for special victims’ counsel, expand access to special victims’ counsel to civilian Defense employees, and provide sexual assault prevention training to junior and senior reserve officer training corps (ROTCs).
The measure would require the secretary of Defense to report to Congress on the current policies, instructions, and practices regarding female service members wearing Muslim garb (p. 155). Current law (P.L. 107-314) prohibits requiring or encouraging service women to wear an abaya or abaya headscarf while stationed in Saudi Arabia.
Citing concerns about the availability of child care on military installations, the bill would direct the secretary to devise a plan to halve the backlog of children waiting to receive child care services by October 2017 (p. 157).
The bill encourages the secretary to notify state attorneys general of the requirement that courts may not base child custody decisions on a parent’s deployment or anticipated deployment (p. 153). Under current law (P.L. 113-291), courts that issued temporary custody orders based solely on deployment or anticipation of deployment must reinstate the custody order that was in effect immediately preceding the temporary order, unless doing so would not be in the best interest of the child.
The legislation would require the secretary of the Army to establish a breastfeeding policy (p. 165) and would require the secretary of Defense to report to Congress on the availability of combat boots for female service members (p. 111).
