JNS
“We talked to the secretary of state directly and got guarantees that any NGOs that are funneling American tax dollars to the Taliban are officially going to be cut off,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna said.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed the annual defense bill, which includes hundreds of millions of dollars in Israel-related spending, with broad bipartisan support on Wednesday.
While the top-line U.S.-Israel missile-defense spending remains the same as last year at $500 million, the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act shifts some of those funds from Iron Dome, a system designed to counter short-range rockets and mortars like those fired by Hamas and Hezbollah, to support for the Arrow 3 upper-tier interceptor program, which intercepts ballistic missiles.
Experts told JNS that the changes might reflect Israel’s current needs and follow sustained U.S. spending on Israel’s defense.
“If there is a shift, it’s probably more about prioritizing Arrow 3 replenishment after rapid, large-scale depletion and the remaining threats—Iran and the Houthis—being further from Israel’s borders, now that Hezbollah and Hamas are degraded,” Ari Cicurel, associate director of foreign policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, told JNS.
A joint explanatory statement about the bill that the House Armed Services Committee released on Saturday calls on the director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency to brief Congress on steps the department is taking alongside Israel to increase production for the Arrow missile defense and whether Congress needs to pass additional legislation to deploy additional interceptor systems.
Retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, pointed to the large expenditures that Iron Dome received in the 2024 supplemental foreign aid bill.
“The movement of funds between existing missile defense programs has to be looked at in the bigger picture—what funding did each system get from the Israel supplemental in 2024,” Montgomery told JNS. “For certain, Iron Dome got a good deal of money in the 2024 supplemental, as did Iron Beam.”
Iron Beam is a directed energy system intended to intercept rockets, mortars and drones currently defended against by Iron Dome but at a fraction of the cost.
The 2026 NDAA passed the House 312-112 after a brief, procedural floor revolt from a handful of Republicans about issues including whether U.S. foreign aid might fall into the hands of the Taliban.
That impasse was resolved when dissenters, including Reps. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), received assurances from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“We talked to the secretary of state directly and got guarantees that any NGOs that are funneling American tax dollars to the Taliban are officially going to be cut off,” Luna said.
“These folks will hate us for free,” Burchett said. “There’s no love for the freakin’ Taliban.”
Burchett, Luna and 16 other Republicans, comprising some of the most conservative members of the House, ultimately voted against the NDAA. The vote also split the Democratic caucus 115-94, but garnered the support of every Democratic House leader except Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), the assistant Democratic leader.
The legislation, which sets the overall U.S. defense budget at $901 billion, includes other Middle East-related provisions, including funding to train counter-ISIS forces in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and a repeal of the Caesar Act sanctions against Syria.
The bill now proceeds to the Senate, where it is expected to pass with bipartisan support.
