House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and other top House Republicans vowed to offer hundreds of amendments in this year's defense bill to root out "woke" ideology in the military.
"We've got a very busy agenda this week, starting [with] the National Defense Authorization Act – a bill that's really important, especially under what we've seen with [President] Biden moving the focus of our Department of Defense away from its core mission and trying to inject his woke ideology, and the Left’s woke ideology, at the expense of our ability to confront our adversaries," Scalise said at a press conference Wednesday alongside other Republican leaders.
The comments come as Republicans gear up for negotiations over this year's National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a battle that promises to see both sides of the aisle work for competing priorities.
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In recent months, Republicans have increasingly sought to scale back what they claim is a turn toward "woke" politics in the military under the leadership of President Biden, arguing the push toward such an agenda has weakened the military's ability to fight wars and contributed to the ongoing recruiting crisis.
Scalise promised that Republicans would make sure the new NDAA "refocuses the military on its core mission," with the party gearing up to offer over 200 amendments during the process aimed at eliminating woke training and combating near-peer adversaries such as China.
"Making sure that we give the tools to our men and women in uniform – not just a pay raise, but the actual tools that they need to go out and be trained properly [and] to go out and have the best military technology in the world to combat adversaries who want to do us and our allies around the world harm," Scalise said.
"And that's what this is focusing on: the threat that the Chinese Communist Party is posing on the world. [President] Biden has gotten so far away from that."
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The fight over this year's NDAA comes as the military has continued to battle a recruiting crisis unseen since switching to an all-volunteer model over 50 years ago.
The Army has been the hardest hit by the crisis, coming up 25% short of its recruiting goal last year. The branch expects to improve upon that number in 2023 but expects to still fall short of this year's goal as well.
Seeking to combat that issue, Scalise expressed confidence Republicans would be able to pass a number of amendments that will end up in the final version of the bill.
"That process is continuing," he said. "We're still having more conversations, but we've already got an agreement on a large number of amendments that we will start taking up today [and] start voting on tomorrow – through the rest of this week – and then ultimately passing the bill."
