Congress’s annual must-pass defense bill has cleared both the House and the Senate with several New Jersey priorities riding alongside it – though six of New Jersey’s members of Congress still voted against it.
Both chambers passed the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act on broad bipartisan votes, including a 77-20 vote in the Senate earlier today. Among the 20 “no” votes, however, came from New Jersey Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim, both of whom cited worries about the lack of guardrails on President Donald Trump.
“Authorizing funding increases without safeguards to hold Donald Trump and his administration accountable would amount to Congress surrendering its constitutional duty to provide a check on this rogue administration and the damage it is doing to our national security departments and agencies,” Booker said in a statement; the senator has consistently voted against NDAAs for years.
Four of New Jersey’s most progressive House members joined them in voting no when the bill came up in their chamber last week: Reps. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch), Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City), LaMonica McIver (D-Newark), and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing). Every other member of the Jersey delegation supported the bill, which passed 312-112.
Now that the NDAA is headed to Trump’s desk, among the provisions likely to be signed into law is an amendment that forestalls moving key personnel away from Picatinny Arsenal in Morris County. The amendment was led by Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill after the Trump administration floated a plan that would shift around 1,000 jobs and $1 billion in funding away from the arsenal.
As explained in more detail by NJ Spotlight News, another key provision inserted by Reps. Donald Norcross (D-Camden) and Herb Conaway (D-Delran) requires the administration to provide more information on immigrants detained at military installations. New Jersey’s Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst is slated to be used as an immigrant detention facility, and Conaway and Norcross have both spent months attempting to learn more about the still-murky plans, with mixed success.
Another Norcross effort, however, was removed from the bill at the last minute. Norcross attempted to insert a provision that would have restored collective bargaining rights for Defense Department employees after they were stripped away by a Trump executive order, but it was removed due to a lack of support in the Senate, per Government Executive.
And a proposed change from Rep. Chris Smith (R-Manchester) requiring the Secretary of Defense to certify that offshore wind projects won’t harm radar capabilities was unexpectedly voted down on the House floor during a September debate on the bill. (Smith did, however, successfully add language requiring the Defense Department to investigate whether Lyme disease began in a military lab.)
