The House of Representatives adopted Rep. Andy Biggs’s (R-Ariz) amendment into the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would slash the defense budget by 0.5 percent if the Pentagon fails an audit.
The chamber greenlit Biggs’s measure via voice vote Tuesday evening, which states that if any component of the Pentagon does not receive either an unqualified or a qualified audit opinion by an “independent external auditor,” it would give up 0.5 percent of its discretionary budget to the Treasury Department in an effort to reduce the deficit.
Military personnel, reserve personnel, National Guard troops and Defense Health Program accounts are exempt from the amendment.
“The President may waive subsection with respect to an account if the President certifies that applying the subsection to that account would harm national security or members of the Armed Forces who are deployed in combat zones,” the amendment’s language says.
The amendment comes as the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the Pentagon is on track to pass a clean audit in 2028, something the department has not been able to do in years.
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“We made it a priority from Day 1, and the process is forcing every corner of the Pentagon to go line by line with exacting detail. Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg spent the past year going through every line of the budget, gaining a granular understanding of our balance sheet,” Hegseth wrote in an op-ed for The New York Post last month.
“This never-before-done, grinding review enabled us to streamline our budget by dramatically reducing non-priority spending, exposing billions in redundancies,” the defense secretary said.
