Rules Committee hears FY2026 NDAA, spotlighting Speed Act procurement reforms and service member pay and housing

The House Rules Committee met Oct. 10 to consider HR 3838, the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which the House Armed Services Committee framed as the Streamlining Procurement for Effective Execution and Delivery Act, or Speed Act, a package of acquisition reforms, service-member pay and housing measures, and global security provisions.

The Speed Act "includes a series of reforms to eliminate regulatory burdens in bureaucratic inertia and put in place a system that will deliver capability to the warfighter at the speed of scale," Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told the Rules Committee. "Fixing acquisitions will go a long way toward ensuring our warfighters are the most capable fighting force on the planet."

Why it matters: the bill aims to shorten the time between identifying a battlefield need and delivering capability, a gap speakers said can take years now and can leave the armed forces behind in fast-moving technologies such as drones and artificial intelligence.

The bill would also provide a 3.8% pay raise for service members and authorizes about $3 billion in construction for housing, dining facilities, medical facilities, childcare centers and schools, according to testimony from Rogers. Committee testimony described the measure as maintaining support for allies and deterrence operations, including specific assistance for Ukraine.

Representative Adam Smith, ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, called the package "a really good product" that came out of an extensive bipartisan process in HASC, and he highlighted acquisition reform and continued support for Ukraine, citing roughly "$400,000,000 in USAI for Ukraine" and additions to support Baltic partners. Smith and Rogers both said the committee reported the bill with overwhelming bipartisan margins; witnesses described committee votes "roughly 56 to 2" during the hearing.

Not all witnesses endorsed the bill without caveats. Representative James McGovern, ranking member of the Rules Committee, criticized what he described as a trend of loading national security bills with what he called unrelated "culture war" items in prior cycles, and said he would withhold support if the bill were filled with such amendments. "The same extremist playbook, pass it out of committee with bipartisan support, then blow it up on the House floor with a pile of culture war garbage that has nothing to do with keeping America safe," McGovern said. He also urged transparency on unrelated high-profile document releases referenced in his remarks.

Committee members asked about key provisions, including the bill's right-to-repair language, which witnesses said was still a work in progress and limited to the Department of Defense. Rogers and Smith described the Speed Act's central acquisition reforms as simplifying requirements rather than prescribing detailed technical specifications, and then imposing statutory time limits and authorities to accelerate decisions.

The hearing portion of the Rules Committee meeting concluded after witness testimony and member questions; no final rule was adopted at the hearing, and the committee recessed "subject to the call of the chair," with prepared statements entered into the record where indicated.

The record: witnesses repeatedly described the bill as bipartisan and characterized acquisition reform as the bill's primary priority for this cycle. Committee members and witnesses also raised oversight concerns related to the use of the military for domestic operations and the effect of personnel changes at the Defense Department on readiness, issues discussed but not resolved during the hearing.