The annual defense policy bills dominate the House and Senate floor agenda this week, with Senate Republicans also looking to speed up the confirmation of President Donald Trump’s nominees.
The Senate’s goal is to finish up its version of the fiscal 2026 defense authorization bill by the end of the week. Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., has filed a substitute amendment including a manager’s package of generally noncontroversial amendments bundled together to expedite the process. Senate leaders also appear to be attempting to roll authorizations for both the intelligence community and the State Department into the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act measure.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., has his chamber’s version of the NDAA on the schedule for the week, as well.
“As threats to our national security grow more complex, we must make certain our fighting force is ready to meet the challenge, and that means delivering the capabilities our warfighters need when they need them. This legislation does just that,” Scalise’s office said in announcing the schedule.
The House’s other headline business is an immigration enforcement measure designed to increase penalties for individuals who illegally reenter the United States and for those who commit felonies after having entered the country illegally.
The Senate, meanwhile, is in the thick of another debate about effectively changing the chamber’s rules governing floor consideration of nominations. Republicans left for the August recess with a backlog of pending confirmations and no appetite on the part of the Democratic minority to allow batches of nominees to be confirmed by unanimous consent.
“This week the Senate will break the logjam on @POTUS nominees,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, posted on X.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune late Monday asked for immediate consideration of an executive resolution which would authorize the en bloc consideration in executive session of certain nominations. Doing so would amend the Senate rules to allow certain presidential nominees to be considered in one vote.
In order to place it on the calendar, he said, he objected to his own request.
The resolution now lies over one calendar day. A copy of the resolution was not immediately available Monday night.
The South Dakota Republican said in a floor speech Monday that after Trump’s eight months in office this term, not one civilian nominee has been confirmed by voice vote.
He compared that to other presidents: George W. Bush and Barack Obama had 90 percent of their civilian nominees confirmed on voice vote, and Trump in his first term and Biden had more than 50 percent.
“It’s time to take steps to restore Senate precedent and codify in Senate rules what was once understood to be standard practice, and that is the Senate acting expeditiously on presidential nominations to allow a president to get his team into place,” Thune said.
Thune said Republicans would seek to allow en bloc nominations for nominees at subcabinet level.
The objective, he said, was “confirming groups of nominees all together so the president can have his team in place and so the Senate can focus on the important legislative work in its charge.”
The Senate would have to take another 600 votes before the end of the year to clear the current backlog of nominees on the calendar and at committee, Thune said.
“That’s more votes than this record-breaking Senate has taken all year up until now,” Thune said. “There is no practical way that we could come close to filling all the vacancies in the four years of this administration, no matter how many hours the Senate works.”
On the committee front, House appropriators consider two contentious bills this week. The Labor-HHS-Education measure is on the Tuesday agenda of the House Appropriations Committee, with the Commerce-Justice-Science bill slated to follow on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the Senate Appropriations Committee Monday night delayed a scheduled Thursday markup of the fiscal 2026 Homeland Security spending bill. The bill is usually the most contentious of the dozen annual appropriations measures, though an aide said the delay is due to a busy floor schedule with consideration of the defense authorization bill and nominations.
There’s other committee business this week, too. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has a Thursday meeting to report out another handful of State Department nominees, while the Senate Judiciary Committee’s agenda includes both U.S. attorneys and federal judicial nominees.
In the House, the Oversight and Government Reform Committee has a Wednesday markup of bills targeting local issues in Washington, D.C.
“President Trump and House Republicans are committed to restoring law and order in our nation’s capital city,” Oversight Chair James R. Comer, R-Ky., said in a statement last week. “Under President Trump’s decisive leadership, crime in D.C. is now falling at an unprecedented rate. The House Oversight Committee stands ready to back the President’s swift action by advancing comprehensive legislative reforms that empower District law enforcement and tackle the escalating juvenile crime crisis head-on.”
The bills include a measure clarifying the congressional review process for local laws in the nation’s capital, as well as the measures backing Trump’s executive actions.
Todd Ruger, John M. Donnelly and Caroline Coudriet contributed to this report.
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