The annual defense policy bill on track to clear Congress in the coming days would compel the Pentagon to provide lawmakers with the specific orders behind the strikes that the United States military is taking on boats in international waters, as well with unedited video of the attacks.
The inclusion of the provisions, tucked into must-pass legislation that sets defense policy and provides a pay raise for U.S. troops, signals bipartisan frustration on Capitol Hill that members of Congress are being kept in the dark about crucial aspects of the operation.
For months, the top Republicans and Democrats on the congressional national security committees have tried without success to compel the Defense Department to share critical information about the attacks, which the Trump administration says are targeting narco-terrorists bringing drugs to the United States.
The legislation aims to force the Pentagon to be more forthcoming. It would withhold 25 percent of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget if he failed to give the congressional national security committees a copy of the execute orders behind the strikes, or to outline how he planned to facilitate future briefings about the operation with lawmakers in accordance with federal law.
The bill also would require that the Defense Department hand over to Congress “unedited video of strikes conducted against designated terrorist organizations” in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific.
Mr. Hegseth has posted edited footage of the strikes on social media, but has so far refused to share the full videos with lawmakers. Some senior members of Congress viewed video of the first strike on Sept. 2 in a classified briefing last week, but have not viewed unedited footage from any of the other 21 known strikes the Pentagon has carried out over the last three months.
Similarly, while the Pentagon has provided lawmakers with summaries of the orders behind the attacks, officials have not provided the actual orders, known as EXORDs, as requested by the House and Senate defense committees, according to a spokesman for Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The new demand and threat to withhold money from the secretary’s office reflected mounting concern among top lawmakers in both parties over the lack of transparency around the open-ended military campaign that has killed at least 87 people.
Mr. Reed said in a floor speech last week that Mr. Hegseth’s unwillingness to answer basic questions on the strikes and provide documents to Congress on the operations, as required by law, was troubling.
“This suggests they know this operation and the tortured legal rationale they use to justify it cannot withstand scrutiny,” he added.
Mr. Reed said that he and Senator Roger Wicker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had given Mr. Hegseth “more than enough time to respond in good faith to reasonable questions,” but that the defense secretary “has refused.”
The two senators had warned in October that the Pentagon was skirting Congress as it continued to ramp up the campaign against alleged drug traffickers at sea. They made public two letters sent to Mr. Hegseth demanding more information on the strikes, saying the secretary had failed to respond.
Federal law requires the Defense Department to send execute orders to the House and Senate Armed Services committees within 15 days of the defense secretary issuing the orders, but officials have failed to do so in the case of the boat strikes. The law also mandates that if the top Republicans or Democrats on the committees were to specifically request such an order, the department would have 30 days to comply, another timeline that the Trump administration has ignored.
The new requirements were added during final negotiations to reconcile the two chambers’ versions of the roughly $900 billion defense policy bill, which the House is expected to pass this week. The Senate is expected to approve it next week, sending it to the president’s desk.
The bill requires the videos and other documents be submitted to the House and Senate Armed Services committees, meaning they would not be seen by the public, unless later declassified and released.
But calls from Democrats for the public release of the video of the Sept. 2 strike are mounting. The opening salvo in the administration’s strikes on traffickers at sea, the early September attack has faced heavy scrutiny partly because of a follow-up strike that killed two survivors.
While Mr. Trump has said he would have “no problem” with the release of the video, Mr. Hegseth over the weekend suggested he would not make it public.
The top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Adam Smith of Washington, who saw the footage last week in a classified briefing, told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, “It seems pretty clear they don’t want to release this video because they don’t want people to see it, because it’s very, very difficult to justify.”
Megan Mineiro is a Times congressional reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
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