The House on Wednesday approved a must-pass defense policy bill, advancing lawmakers’ effort to force the release of a video showing the controversial military strike that killed two men who survived an initial attack on their alleged drug smuggling vessel.
The vote was 312 to 112. The Senate could pass the measure in coming days, and lawmakers say they are confident President Donald Trump will sign it into law.
The legislation would withhold 25 percent of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget until he discloses all of his orders authorizing close to two dozen military attacks since September in the waters off Latin America and releases unedited video of those operations — including the Sept. 2 strikes that killed 11 people, including the two men who survived the initial hit on their boat.
Experts on the law of armed conflict, along with many Democrats and select Republicans, have questioned whether it was lawful for U.S. forces to target the boat again when the first strike failed to kill everyone aboard.
The GOP-led House and Senate armed services committees quickly opened probes into the operation, shortly after The Washington Post reported many details of the attack two weeks ago. On Tuesday, Rep Mike D. Rogers (Alabama), who chairs the House panel, said he was satisfied with the information he had received from the Pentagon and planned to close his committee’s inquiry.
Still, spokespeople for the committee said the full panel would probably first have the opportunity to watch the full video of the strike and perhaps meet with the military officer who oversaw the operation, Adm. Frank M Bradley. Rogers and other select lawmakers viewed the footage and spoke with Bradley last week.
The $900 billion defense bill is focused largely on reforming the Pentagon’s bureaucratic system for buying weapons, which members of both parties have said wastes taxpayer money and risks America’s ability to compete with such adversaries as Russia and China.
But as one of Capitol Hill’s main areas of leverage over the Defense Department, the bill also presents an opportunity for Congress to force the Pentagon to share more information — a recurrent complaint from the armed services committees during Hegseth’s tenure. The legislation compels the department to consult with lawmakers before withdrawing U.S. troops from Europe or South Korea and before restructuring America’s vast military commands around the world.
The bill also renews U.S. security aid programs to Ukraine and the three small Baltic nations that border Russia. The Pentagon had signaled this year that it intended to shelve the initiatives, amid the Trump administration’s transactional approach to foreign policy.
The normally bipartisan bill has in recent years become more controversial in the House, where lawmakers have used it to advance Republican cultural policies, such as limits on gender transition care and abortion in the armed services. Many of these provisions were inserted into the House’s earlier version of the bill but removed during negotiations with the Senate.
Some Democrats still expressed frustration with the final text, which removed certain provisions that had advanced in each chamber with bipartisan support, in particular language that would have restored the work of a commission previously tasked with renaming Army bases that honored the Confederacy.
The bill also includes a nearly 4 percent pay raise for service members.
A surprise victory for lawmakers seeking to constrain the administration’s authority to use lethal force came in a provision that would repeal the authorizations for military force granted ahead of the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 Iraq War. Congress has tried and failed to nix the authorizations in recent years.
Members of the House and the Senate are planning votes in the coming weeks seeking to rein in the administration’s deadly campaign against alleged drug smuggling vessels off Latin America, an unprecedented use of military force that has targeted more than 20 vessels and killed nearly 90 people, according to public notices from the Pentagon.
Two votes in the Senate, intended to halt the boat strike campaign and any potential attacks on Venezuelan territory, have failed.
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