A progressive Democrat and a libertarian Republican are trying to kill the same line in the new defense bill. Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie both pledged over the weekend to strike Section 224, the provision that would deepen US-Israel military tech cooperation, from the House’s $1.15 trillion National Defense Authorization Act before the Armed Services Committee marks it up on Thursday.
The pairing is the thread to watch here. Khanna and Massie have lined up on the same side of Israel-related fights for more than a year now, and this one fits a slow shift in Washington: a small but real cross-ideological group that is willing to go after the US-Israel defense relationship at the level of plumbing, not just dollars.
What Section 224 Would Set Up
The provision carries a bland title, the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” and a far-reaching instruction. It would order the Secretary of Defense to name an executive agent tasked with synchronizing American and Israeli work on defense technology, covering research, development, testing, evaluation, integration and industrial cooperation. The language sits inside the chairman’s mark of the 2027 defense authorization bill (H.R. 8800), the version House leaders bring to markup.
What the executive agent would oversee is broad:
- Bilateral defense technology research, development, testing and evaluation
- Co-production, joint ventures, licensing and industrial cooperation
- Early areas flagged for accelerated work: artificial intelligence, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber and biotechnology
- “Network integration” and “data fusion” between the two militaries
- A briefing to the congressional defense committees within 180 days, then annual reports running through 2030
The mechanics matter because they are new. The United States already runs joint missile-defense programs with Israel and funds them through a standing aid deal. A designated executive agent inside the Pentagon, charged with wiring the two systems together across a dozen frontier technologies, is a different kind of arrangement. That is the piece Khanna and Massie say they want gone.
The Khanna-Massie Alliance Reassembles
This is not a first date. Khanna, the California progressive, and Massie, the Kentucky libertarian, have repeatedly found the same ground on foreign policy and oversight, even as nearly everything else separates them.
They opposed US involvement in Israel’s war with Iran last year. They co-wrote the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which forced the Justice Department to publish records tied to Jeffrey Epstein; the House passed it 427 to 1 in November 2025, and President Donald Trump signed it days later. Their willingness to drag the Epstein records bill onto the House floor over leadership objections is the same move they are now promising on Section 224. It also echoes other odd-couple efforts on the Hill, like the Cruz-Cantwell push to regulate college sports pay, where ideological opposites cut a deal the leadership did not want.
On the defense bill, the two are splitting the work by where they sit.
| Ro Khanna | Thomas Massie | |
|---|---|---|
| Party and seat | Democrat, California | Republican, Kentucky |
| Lane | Progressive | Libertarian |
| Plan against the clause | Amendment inside the Armed Services Committee | Amendment on the House floor |
| Current standing | Sitting committee member | Lost his May primary to a Trump-backed challenger |
Khanna framed the partnership as durable. “Trump can’t kill the Massie/Khanna partnership no matter how much he posts on Truth Social,” he wrote on X, adding, “And I will be offering an amendment in the committee itself to strip section 224 out.”
Why the Amendment Faces Long Odds
The political map runs against them. Section 224 did not slip in through a back door; it sits in the chairman’s mark, the document built by the committee’s leadership. Both the chairman, Mike Rogers of Alabama, and the panel’s senior Democrat, Adam Smith of Washington, signed off on the underlying bill. Stripping a leadership-blessed provision in committee means peeling off members of both parties at once.
Massie’s leverage is also thinner than it was. He lost his May primary to a Trump-endorsed opponent, which makes him a lame duck for the rest of this Congress. His threat to force a floor vote still carries weight, since a recorded vote puts every member on the record, but he no longer has the implicit shield of a safe seat behind it.
Massie laid down the marker anyway. “If the provision in the NDAA to integrate/synchronize the US and Israeli militaries (section 224) makes it out of committee, I’ll offer an amendment to strip it from the bill on the floor,” he wrote, adding flatly, “We are a sovereign country.” The first test arrives June 4, when the committee takes up the bill.
Who Else Is Lining Up Against the Provision
The two lawmakers are the visible face of a wider pushback, and that is the part of this story most coverage has treated as background. Think tanks and advocacy groups that favor military restraint have spent the past week trying to turn an obscure subsection into a fight.
The sharpest read came from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank that argues for a narrower US military footprint abroad.
It also proposes ‘network integration’ and ‘data fusion.’ In other words, the US military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data. If fully enacted, this proposal would provide a higher level of military-industrial integration than the US has with any other country in the world.
That assessment came from Ben Freeman, director of the institute’s Democratizing Foreign Policy program. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil-rights group, circulated an action alert urging members to oppose the provision on sovereignty grounds. CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin called the clause “even deeper and more insidious” than the aid debates Americans usually see.
What ties these groups to Massie and Khanna is not a shared ideology. It is a shared target. The same restraint-minded coalition that mobilized against the Iran strikes last year has kept its network intact and pointed it at the defense bill. That is the sleeper development worth tracking, well past whatever happens to one amendment.
From Military Aid to Military Integration
The reason critics treat Section 224 as a category change, rather than more of the same, comes down to how the US relationship with Israel has been structured. For decades it has run on money. The current framework is a ten-year aid memorandum signed in 2016, worth $38 billion across fiscal 2019 through 2028, or about $3.8 billion a year. That is foreign military financing: the US writes checks, Israel buys hardware, and the two militaries stay separate.
An executive agent fusing research pipelines, supply chains and battlefield data describes something else. Steven Simon, a Middle East scholar at the Quincy Institute, has flagged the shift from an aid model to an integration model as the substantive change buried in the legislative text.
The timing also sits awkwardly against where some Democrats have moved. Khanna recently opposed American funding for Israel’s Iron Dome system, a position that would have been unusual for a mainstream House Democrat a few years ago. A growing slice of his party has cooled on open-ended military support during the war in Gaza, and Section 224 hands that bloc a concrete, technical thing to vote against rather than a general objection to aid.
The Path Runs Through Thursday’s Markup
The procedure splits in two. Khanna goes first, offering his amendment when the Armed Services Committee marks up the bill. If the provision survives that room, Massie has said he will try again on the House floor, where a recorded vote would force all 435 members to take a public position on US-Israel military integration.
Neither path is favored, given that committee leaders from both parties wrote the clause in. But the pair have beaten committee leadership before, most recently by discharging the Epstein records bill against the wishes of House management. The forcing mechanism is the same; the subject is harder.
The committee markup is scheduled for June 4. Whether Section 224 survives that day, the coalition assembled to fight it has already shown it can keep returning to the same question from opposite ends of the spectrum.
