By John Conger

The Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was signed by U.S. President Joe Biden on December 22, 2023.  The annual policy bill often has a wide range of pragmatic provisions on energy, environment and climate activities, and this year was no exception.  However, some of the policies under consideration reflected more contentious debates in Congress.  I previewed these in a blog earlier this year, and now there is at least some resolution on each issue, with final resolution coming when the FY 2024 appropriations bills are passed (assuming they are, in fact, passed).

Below is a recap of the three overarching topics I highlighted previously: Emissions Counting; Blocking Climate-Related Executive Orders; and Cuts to Climate Investments.

Emissions Counting: With both the House and Senate passing a version of a provision prohibiting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reporting requirements for certain Department of Defense (DoD) contractors, it was reasonable to assume something similar would be included in the final bill.  The conference report includes a measure that:

1. Prohibits DoD from requiring non-traditional contractors (defined as those that have not had a contract with DoD in the last year) to report GHG emissions; and
2. Places a one-year moratorium on requiring any DoD contractor to report emissions.

Notably, this allows the Administration to proceed on finalizing and promulgating its rule that incorporates GHG counting into the Federal Acquisition Regulations more broadly across the U.S. government.  It simply creates a transition period to allow contractors to prepare for new reporting requirements.

Blocking Climate-Related Executive Orders: The House version of the NDAA carried an amendment (passed on the House floor by one vote) that blocked funds for executing a series of Executive Orders that direct Federal agencies to focus on climate impacts.  It was omitted from the final version of the bill.  

This is not the final resolution on the issue, as similar amendments were added to multiple appropriations measures, but it provides an inkling as to how those might be resolved.

Cuts to Climate Investments: The most sweeping cuts to DoD climate investments were made by the House Appropriations Committee in its mark-up of the FY24 Defense Appropriations bill, which has yet to pass Congress. The Committee’s cuts reduced multiple accounts with a specific intention of cutting initiatives focused on climate. These include cuts to base operations to reduce resilience investments, to operational energy research accounts that will increase the efficiency of future systems, and to programs focused on the development of hybrid and electric ground systems. In contrast, the House and Senate Armed Services committees, who are responsible for the final authorization measure, neither criticized climate investments nor cut them so dramatically as the appropriators.  However, the fact that they did not include such dramatic reductions at the authorized funding levels in FY24 NDAA likely doesn’t predict how the appropriations negotiations will be resolved.  

In addition to staving off the worst of the provisions meant to hamper progress on climate security and resilience, the final version of the NDAA legislation addresses climate, resilience, and energy policy in many other ways.  Some notable provisions include:

• Amendments to, and formal codification of, the Sentinel Landscapes program, which links DoD with the Departments of Agriculture and Interior (and other federal agencies whom in the future elect to join as full partners) in a partnership to advance conservation and resilience in the landscapes around certain military installations—advancing each of the partner agencies’ missions complementarily (Sec 311);
• A requirement to develop a charging plan at an installation before acquiring electric vehicles for use on that base (Sec 319);
• A requirement to incorporate military installation resilience into formal guidance documents within DoD, particularly those governing installation master planning (Sec 2857); 
• A technical correction in the Defense Operational Resilience International Cooperation (DORIC) program that allows DoD to collaborate with partner nations that do not have standing military forces (Sec 1226); and
• Improvements to support extreme weather forecasting (Sec 1090) and the transfer of aircraft to improve wildfire suppression capacity (Sec 1810).

Finally, the FY 2024 Intelligence Authorization Act, which was enacted in conjunction with the NDAA, included a provision that moved the sunset date of the Climate Security Advisory Committee from the end of 2025 to 2024. (Sec 7319)  

Looking back at consideration by the Armed Services Committees over this year, it is clear that the connection between the impacts of climate change on the military and the mission and installation protection orientation of climate resilience authorities and actions helped climate security avoid some politicization, particularly in the House.  Whenever climate change is made a partisan issue, the military mission suffers for it.  Fortunately, the outcome in the FY 2024 NDAA largely maintained the pragmatic approach that has characterized how Congress has addressed these issues in the NDAAs over the past several years. While some of the proposed amendments are and remain worrying, this NDAA is certainly better than it could’ve been on climate security.