Defense spending bill risks Trump veto

WASHINGTON — The Senate set up a clash with the White House on Thursday with the passage of a $740 billion defense bill that would remove the names of Confederate generals from bases and exclude the transfer of public lands in Nevada for military training by the Air Force and Navy.

President Donald Trump said he will veto any bill that includes language that would strip the names of Confederate war heroes from installations that include Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

The White House identified a list of other items tucked into the massive spending bill that would also draw a presidential veto.

Those include omitting the expansion of training into public, private and tribal lands by Naval Air Station Fallon and Air Force training expansion into the Desert National Wildlife Refuge, northwest of Las Vegas.

The military land transfer requests in Nevada were left out of both the House and Senate versions of the defense legislation. The Senate bill passed its version 86-14.

Nevada Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, both Democrats, voted for the bill.

Rosen said the defense bill does not include funding to revive the process by the Department of Energy to permanently store nuclear waste in Nevada, something the administration has proposed for the past three years but abruptly dropped in its budget request in this presidential election year.

“The National Defense Authorization Act includes zero funding for defense nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain — something that I have fought against since I arrived in Congress,” Rosen said.

Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., who voted against the bill in the House, said he hoped that the Navy, local and tribal leaders could craft a workable solution to expand the Fallon Range Training Complex and that a compromise bill would include the expansion.

The Air Force was seeking use of 840,000 acres of the Desert National Wildlife Refuge, adjacent to the Nevada Test and Training Range, for military exercises.

Environmentalist and conservation groups, tribal leaders and local communities opposed the land transfer. An attempt to include it in the House bill by Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, was blocked with language by Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., and supported by Rep. Dina Titus and Rep. Susie Lee, both Nevada Democrats.

Cortez Masto included language in the Senate legislation that would create commissions to hammer out land use agreements between the Air Force, Navy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as well as local and tribal governments to find consensus on expansion.

The sweeping defense bills contain a 3 percent pay raise for military personnel. Nevada is home for four installations: Creech AFB, Nellis AFB, NAS Fallon and the Hawthorne Army Depot.

There are more than 10,000 active duty troops and airmen in the state who would see the pay hikes.

Rosen said the bill includes authorization for a new backup generator at Creech.

A previous version of this article gave an incorrect location for Fort Bragg.

Contact Gary Martin at gmartin@reviewjournal.com or 202-662-7390. Follow @garymartindc on Twitter.