The Pentagon spending bill that got final approval from Congress on Thursday is an outright monstrosity, even by Washington’s standards.
It provides almost $860 billion in spending for the Defense Department and spans roughly 4,400 pages.
But it did include some victories for Republicans in the Democratic-controlled Congress.
One was the end of President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for military personnel.
The other was the end of the Pentagon’s “white supremacy” witch hunt.
Roll Call reported that the final version of the bill “deleted or diluted all eight House-passed NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act] provisions pertaining to extremism in the U.S. military or American society.”
As The Free Press has reported, one of Biden’s first priorities upon taking office was to root out “white supremacy” and extremism in the Defense Department.
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The problem was that there was no such thing.
In July, as The Free Press noted, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report calling for Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to call off this search. Austin had ordered a review of supposed extremist ties among troops because military veterans comprised 17% of the Jan. 6 rioters.
Yet a special Pentagon committee formed to conduct the extremist manhunt noted in December 2021 that it had uncovered 100 cases of “extremism” in a total military force of over 2 million people. That was .005%.
The Center for Strategic & International Studies studied the Biden administration’s work to hunt down these “extremists.” In its analysis, CSIS noted, “Those involved in violent extremism make up a minuscule fraction of a percent of all service members.”
Over the summer, as Roll Call reported, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report that said, “spending additional time and resources to combat exceptionally rare instances of extremism in the military is an inappropriate use of taxpayer funds, and should be discontinued by the Department of Defense immediately.”
The Pentagon was not about to do that.
But the Senate did. This week.
Roll Call reported, “Of the eight provisions — by the House that allegedly targeted the threat posed by groups such as domestic terrorists, criminal gangs and organizations committed to advancing white supremacy or antisemitism — seven were completely removed from the bill that is expected to become law. The other House-passed provision, which requires a report, was reduced in scope so it would discuss only foreign threats, not homegrown ones.”
“The final bill added just one section at all related to domestic extremism: a requirement for the director of national intelligence to assess how social media posts are used in screening personnel, including for extremist ties,” Roll Call noted.
Roll Call also pointed out that a special Pentagon committee formed to conduct the manhunt reported in December 2021 that “it had found 100 cases of extremism in a total military force of over 2 million people — or .005 percent.”
Liberals, of course, were upset that the Senate axed these provisions since they see racism everywhere they look.
According to Roll Call, the language that was cut included:
- A requirement for a Pentagon-led report on the threat from domestic extremists
- Another Pentagon report on “antisemitism and violent extremism, including the threat they pose to the U.S. armed forces.
Still a third report, this one interagency “on white supremacists and neo-Nazis in U.S. military and law enforcement and strategies to combat them.”
Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, had argued for the end of the told manhunt, telling Roll Call in July that extremists “have no place in our military,” but also that the federal government needed “to balance the size of the problem with the investment we make in dealing with it.”
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