by Owen Klinsky
A little-known environmental provision in the fiscal year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has no impact on military operations, but will instead serve to “protect the native vegetation,” a Navy spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a statement Tuesday.
The nearly $884 billion defense bill passed by the U.S. Senate Wednesday includes an initiative to “manage, control and interdict the coconut rhinoceros beetle” — an invasive species of insect that bore holes into the canopies of palm trees — “on military installations in Hawaii.” By the Navy’s own admission, the initiative’s purpose is to preserve vegetation, and thus is effectively unrelated to the Department of Defense’s (DOD) stated mission “to provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security.”
“While coconut rhinoceros beetles (CRB) don’t pose an operational threat to Navy installations in Hawaii, the invasive insects cause significant harm to the environment,” a spokesperson from Commander, Navy Region Hawaii told the DCNF. “CRB damage and kill palm trees, including the native loulou-hiwa palm (Pritchardia martii), and have potential to significantly reduce coconut production and palm stands … It was important for the Navy to fund projects related to CRB control to protect the native vegetation on Oahu.”
The NDAA is a hot piece of garbage.
They’ve stripped out almost every provision related to cleaning up the military’s expenditures on Wokeness, DEI, and Critical Race Theory, while also leaving in the abortion travel fund. It needs to be voted down. pic.twitter.com/33rRLBNb7t
— Rep. Eric Burlison (@RepEricBurlison) December 11, 2023
The spokesperson justified the effort on the grounds the Navy is meant to serve as a “steward” of the environment, adding that “biosecurity has become an increasing priority and preventing new introductions of invasive species is critical.” Biosecurity became a DOD priority under former President Barack Obama in 2015, when the agency completed the Regional Biosecurity Plan (RBP) to limit the potential for invasive species to be spread in the Pacific as part of “the environmental impact analysis for a plan to potentially relocate military personnel from a base in Okinawa, Japan.”
The Navy also funded an initiative to combat coconut rhinoceros beetles in fiscal year 2024, authorizing the creation of a “2,500 feet containment zone around Navy sea and air ports” and establishing “bi-annual surveys and treatment of palm trees,” the DOD spokesperson told the DCNF. The fiscal year 2025 NDAA does not clarify how much federal funding will go toward the coconut rhinoceros beetle initiative.
In addition to the coconut rhinoceros beetle containment push, the fiscal year 2025 NDAA also greenlights hundreds of millions in funding for “minority serving” schools and bankrolls the cryogenic freezing of service members’ sperm.
The Pentagon notoriously failed its seventh annual audit in a row in November after not fully accounting for its budget of over $824 billion. The agency has not passed a single audit since it became legally required to perform them in 2018.
Moreover, a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office released Tuesday found the Navy wasted over $1.8 billion on an initiative with “weak oversight” to modernize cruisers. The federal government ran a deficit of roughly $1.8 trillion in fiscal year 2024 while the U.S. national debt currently exceeds $36 trillion, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center’s deficit tracker and U.S. Treasury data.
The U.S. Senate passed the roughly 1,800-page fiscal year 2025 NDAA Wednesday with 85 members in favor and 14 against, with the legislation now slated to travel to President Joe Biden’s desk to be signed into law.
“There’s a half a billion dollars in there of foreign aid,” Republican Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett, who voted against the bill, said in a video on X following the its passage. “We have to do better than this. This is not what you all voted for.”
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Owen Klinsky is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
