Congressional leaders are aiming to have the Defense Policy bill voted on by the House this week. The bill authorizes a total of $858 billion, of which $847 billion will go to defense spending.
The law requires the Department of Defense to waive vaccine mandates within 30 days of becoming law.
Republicans say the mandate, first introduced by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in August 2021, exacerbated the military draft crisis by expelling thousands of people who declined to shoot. Still, about 98% of the military is vaccinated, according to the Pentagon.
Neither the House nor Senate defense bills included mandate rollback — and proposals to remove or void it were defeated by the Armed Services Committee — for Republicans at NDAA talks over the past few weeks. Getting rid of the policy has become a top priority. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy He has argued over the Democratic Party’s “awakeningism” that the defense bill should be delayed until January, but calls for an end to mandatory vaccines.
“We’ve been fighting for this a long time. This is the difference when people go vote,” McCarthy said on Fox News after the bill was released. “We just posted it. We just won.”
Republicans also complain that military rules that allow for religious exemptions are too strict to accommodate them.
A bloc of Republican senators led by a senator. Rand Paul Kentucky state legislators have threatened to stall the bill if they don’t get votes on ending the mandate and reinstating the military with the accrued money.
But the bill falls short of what some die-hard opponents of mandatory vaccines wanted. Specifically, the Pentagon doesn’t have to reinstate or give back salaries to troops fired because they weren’t shot.
Both Biden and Austin oppose ending the mission as a matter of military readiness, administration officials say.
“Secretary Austin has made it very clear that he opposes repealing the vaccine policy, and the president actually agrees with the secretary of defense,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Tuesday. Told. “He continues to believe that all Americans, including those in the military, should be vaccinated and boosted for Covid-19.”
But the White House has not suggested that Biden, with whom McCarthy recently discussed the issue, would veto the mandatory-passage defense bill over nullifying the policy.
Even some Democrats acknowledged that the time for the mandate may have passed.house arm service chair Adam Smith (D-Wash) said it was ready to discuss the policy.
“I was a very strong supporter of mandatory vaccines when we did it.” Smith told POLITICO in an interview on Saturday“But at this point, does it make sense to have that policy from August 2021?”
