Trump signs NDAA giving path to citizenship to 4,000 Liberian DED
Trump signs defense bill creating Space Force
BY REBECCA KHEEL - 12/20/19 08:07 PM EST 281
President Trump signed the annual defense policy bill Friday night, establishing his much-touted Space Force and giving federal workers 12 weeks of paid parental leave.
Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) at a ceremony at Joint Base Andrews before leaving for Mar-a-Lago for the holidays.
The $738 billion compromise bill gave all parties something to crow about after months of negotiations between the Democratic-controlled House, the Republican-led Senate and the White House that got bogged down in debates about Trump's border wall.
Signing it also provided Trump the opportunity to tout achieving some of his top priorities at the end of a week that saw him becoming the third president in American history to be impeached.
In a win for Trump, the NDAA establishes Space Force as the sixth branch of the U.S. military, with a goal of protecting U.S. assets in space from threats from Russia and China. The new service will be part of the Department of the Air Force in a structure similar to the Marine Corps’ relationship to the Navy and will be led by a four-star chief of space operations.
Trump floated establishing a Space Force in 2018, and it has since become a top priority and reliable applause line at his rallies. But the idea for a separate military service for space originated as a bipartisan proposal in the House in 2017.
Democrats have trumpeted the NDAA’s inclusion of paid parental leave as a major win. The bill gives all federal employees 12 weeks of paid parental leave in what’s being touted as a historic deal to give the benefit to more than 2 million Americans for the first time ever.
Trump, whose daughter and adviser Ivanka has made paid family leave a signature issue, also counted the parental leave policy as a win for him.
Both sides also had gripes with the bill. Fiscal conservatives in Congress balked at the price tag, particularly the parental leave policy that the Congressional Budget Office estimated could cost $3.3 billion over the next five years.
Progressives, meanwhile, felt burned that most of their priorities were stripped from the bill during negotiations.
The final NDAA eliminated House-passed provisions that would have blocked Trump from dipping into Pentagon funds for his border wall, reversed Trump’s transgender military ban, blocked Trump from taking military action against Iran, cut off U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, forced the cleanup of cancer-linked “forever chemicals” called PFAS, blocked the deployment of the low-yield nuclear warhead and banned new transfers to the Guantanamo Bay detention center.
Ultimately, though, the bill passed Congress with large bipartisan majorities, 86-8 in the Senate and 377-48 in the House.
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4...ng-space-force
