| Guest: | Mitchell Miller |
| Title: | Capitol Hill correspondent, WTOP |
| Summary: | From the NDAA fight over helicopter flights near Reagan National to stalled health care extensions, unfinished oversight on a deadly boat strike and nine spending bills still hanging in the balance, Congress is juggling high-stakes battles with no easy compromises. |
Defense, health care, oversight and spending; these four fronts are exposing deep divides on Capitol Hill
"[Republicans] don't want one of those big deals and they're not going to get it because everything got pushed into 2026," said Mitchell Miller.
Interview transcript
Terry Gerton Hottest topic I think is the NDAA on the Hill. It passed the House. What’s going on next?
Mitchell Miller Well, it’s going to the Senate and there are a few little tripwires in the overall, more than 3,000-page bill, but I think it is on its way to getting passed. This is something, as you well know, that is always passed every year for more than six decades, which is pretty rare in this sharply divided Congress. So there’s, you know, a lot of support for it broadly. I think obviously the 3.8 percent pay increase for military personnel. A lot of talk among the leadership related to acquisition and the reforms that are taking place related to that, that a lot of these weapon systems, basically there’s a concern among lawmakers that the Pentagon can’t obviously, you know — the metaphor is you can’t turn around an aircraft carrier very quickly. And similarly with acquisition, you can’t just adjust something super fast, but they have put in a lot of reforms that the lawmakers at least believe will allow the Pentagon to quickly react and create new weapon systems on a faster glide path than they currently are now.
Terry Gerton As people have been making their way through the 3,000 pages in the conference bill, there’s been some surprise about provisions that folks thought were home runs and got dropped as the bill went through conference.
Mitchell Miller Right, and one of them is the right to repair provision, which of course would allow people to basically, within units of the defense department, to fix their own equipment, which sounds pretty basic, but it would provide a lot of additional resources to do that. And everybody thought that was going to go through pretty easily, but for whatever reason it was pulled, and I think that has sent some shock waves through the contracting world as to why that is going to happen. I think that as we move into the next year we will probably see that looked at again. Certainly some things have been pulled or changed over the course of this whole NDAA process. And one of the side notes that came up this past week was the fact that they would basically allow for the Army to continue its helicopter flights near Reagan National Airport as they used to. They of course have been limited since that accident, terrible accident in January that killed 67 people in a midair collision involving an Army helicopter and a commercial jet liner. And there was a lot of furor last week among lawmakers related to — including this language that essentially says that the Army gets a buy on putting in the new communications systems that would allow for helicopters to be quickly identified, more quickly identified than on radar and that they could essentially potentially go back to the status quo. So I talked to Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) and he says he’s going to reach out to the Pentagon to try to see if they can get that changed. But I don’t think these issues will jeopardize the overall NDAA. I think we can see that it will be passed this week.
Terry Gerton Well that will be progress at least to have one of those bills through, even with some of these outstanding issues. The other funding issue that’s certainly top of mind is whether or not we’re going to get a repeal on the ACA extensions. It failed in the Senate. Where does it go next?
Mitchell Miller Well, this is really interesting because, you know, during the whole debate over the government shutdown, they said, oh, we have plenty of time. We can deal with this later. It doesn’t happen until the end of the year, the subsidies going away from the ACA. Well, here we are. And we have not really gotten through any kind of progress. The Senate, as you mentioned, voted down two proposals, dueling proposals. One, the Democrats wanted to extend the ACA subsidies for three years. The Republicans came up with an alternative plan related to health savings accounts, which they say would provide more control for Americans over their own health care costs. And variations of those two themes are now being sorted out in the House. A lot of House moderates on the Republican side, frankly, are concerned that it’s going to look bad politically heading into the midterms if they don’t do anything related to this issue. So you have a really unique situation where this is such a big issue that you have people trying to essentially do an end run with discharge petitions in the House for the Republican leadership. Various proposals extending the ACA possibly two years with caps on how much people can make, various requirements related to cutting out fraud. So it’s going to be fascinating to see how all this unravels this week in the House. My personal thinking is that they are not going to get anything actually passed this week. And then we are going to, of course, head into the new year where you’re going to have more than 20 million people under those ACA provisions who will be seeing those soaring costs related to their health care premiums. So it’s pretty fascinating that Congress just was not able to do this, at least to this point.
Terry Gerton Mitchell Miller is Capitol Hill correspondent for WTOP. Mitchell, around that ACA issue, there was so much bad blood and mistrust throughout the shutdown. How is that impacting what’s got to happen next, which is appropriations bills?
Mitchell Miller You know, it’s really left a bad feeling on both sides, I think. And unfortunately that has impacted this whole appropriations process. You know, all year long we heard nothing but talk about, we want to get back to regular order. We’re going to pass all of these 12 bills. Well, here we are in December, and we only have three bills that have been passed in terms of those overall appropriations. So the thinking is, among several lawmakers including Senator Tim Kane (D-Va.), who I spoke to recently, is that maybe they can chip away, maybe they can find some more and put them in an omnibus. They were talking about possibly doing an omnibus before they take their break, but that is simply not going to happen. So now they’re looking at maybe January to potentially get another minibus, if you will, maybe get four or five of these major legislative packages through that way. But then we’re staring down the barrels once again of Jan. 30, the shutdown showdown. And I’ve talked to some lawmakers about that, and they said, yep, it’s going to be here before we know it. So they’re hoping at least to get some goodwill back in the appropriations process as they chip away, as I said, related to these other measures. On the other side, I will say that the House speaker, Mike Johnson (R-La.), was very happy to make the point recently that they will not have the overall huge omnibus that, as you know, they often have right before Christmas or right during the holidays where they have to get everything done. This has been something that the Republicans have been really pushing back on. They don’t want one of those big deals and they’re not going to get it because everything got pushed into 2026.
Terry Gerton Well, it sounds like some lawmakers might be getting coal in their Christmas stockings.
Mitchell Miller I think there will be a lot of coal in Christmas stockings this year.
Terry Gerton Mitchell, one of the other topics that comes to mind when you mention regular order is congressional oversight hearings. And there was a move towards oversight, especially regarding the boat strikes over the last week or so. What are you seeing there?
Mitchell Miller Well, I think it’s an interesting tale of two cities, if you will, or tale of two chambers. On the House side, you’ve got a lot of review that has been taking place within the House Armed Services Committee, but the chairman, Mike Rogers, essentially said he is satisfied with what he has seen related to the video of that so called ‘two tap’ strike. And then on the other side, on the Senate side, Roger Wicker (R-MS), the Republican chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee says, Well, I wanna see a little bit more. I wanna get all the lawmakers on the committee to actually see the whole video. So it’s interesting to see that little mini divide within the Republican Party. And then of course you have Democrats who are really calling for a lot more oversight, saying they have to look into this more, and of course that was exacerbated even more by the seizure of the tanker related to Venezuela. So there is a move, I think, among lawmakers to reassert some of the powers of the legislative branch, but we’ll have to see how much that moves forward.
Terry Gerton Well the judicial branch got involved last week as well. There was a Supreme Court hearing on Monday about whether or not Trump’s firing of an FTC commissioner was constitutional. And that has a lot of impact potentially for independent agencies. Any response there?
Mitchell Miller Yeah, there’s a lot of concern about it because it seems like, at least, particularly on the Democratic side, they feel that all of these independent panels are just slowly being taken away by various executive orders, and in this case in the Supreme Court order — decision. And there is a feeling that if this is allowed to continue, there really won’t be any more independent panels, that it will go back essentially to the spoil system that used to take place many years ago and they tried to wipe away all of this so that the politics didn’t get involved with all these panels and commissions and committees. And that’s why there is so much at stake to jump to the midterm elections, because right now there really isn’t going to be much oversight related to this on the Republican side. They feel like the president has the power, he is going to do what he wants. But if the House flips and goes to the Democrats, then I think you’re going to see a lot more oversight on issues just like this one, on issues like the one you spoke of related to the boat strikes. So that could really have a profound impact on what happens with Congress moving forward.
Terry Gerton Well, it doesn’t sound like we’ll get much of a break over the holiday season. There’s much to watch here as we go forward.
Mitchell Miller Lots of busy things happening here.
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Terry Gerton
Terry Gerton is host of the Federal Drive and has been working in or with the federal government for more than 40 years.
