Section 224 Is Writing Permanent U.S.-Israel Military Ties Into Law

Section 224 of the FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would establish the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, placing a Pentagon executive agent in charge of synchronizing joint research, weapons co-production, and artificial intelligence development between the two countries’ militaries. Critics at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft say the provision, once embedded in defense procurement contracts, would be functionally impossible to unwind. The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) voted it through on June 4 by voice vote, one day after the full House passed a war powers resolution demanding the Iran war end, 215 to 208.

A Pew Research Center survey of 3,507 U.S. adults conducted in late March found 60 percent of American adults view Israel unfavorably, a nearly 20-point increase since 2022. The committee voted the provision through anyway.

A New Framework in a Must-Pass Bill

The provision was introduced May 26, 2026, as part of the HASC chairman’s mark for the FY2027 NDAA, a $1.15 trillion piece of legislation that serves as the annual blueprint for American military spending and policy. Its language derives from the U.S.-Israel FUTURES Act (United States-Israel Framework for Upgraded Technologies, Unified Research, and Enhanced Security Act), a bill co-sponsored by Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) and Sens. Ted Budd and Kirsten Gillibrand that never passed through regular congressional order. Embedding it in the NDAA grants it statutory permanence that an interagency memorandum or stand-alone pilot program would not carry.

The provision requires the Secretary of Defense to designate an executive agent responsible for synchronizing bilateral cooperation across defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial partnership. That agent operates under the Secretary’s authority without requiring Senate confirmation, reducing the number of choke points where a future Congress could intervene.

The FY2027 NDAA as written allocates $750 million in U.S.-Israel cooperative programs, according to AIPAC’s factsheet on this NDAA cooperative funding initiative, broken down across four areas:

• $500 million for U.S.-Israel Missile Defense Cooperation
• $100 million for Counter-Unmanned Systems (C-UxS) cooperation
• $100 million for Subterranean Operations cooperation
• $50 million for Emerging Technologies cooperation, including artificial intelligence, quantum machine learning, directed energy, and biotechnology

The New Republic reported that no other U.S. ally holds a dedicated executive-agent structure of this kind within the Department of Defense, including any NATO partner or AUKUS members the UK and Australia.

Beyond the Annual Aid Check

Since fiscal year 2019, U.S. military support for Israel has run through a 10-year memorandum of understanding (MOU), negotiated in 2016 during the Obama administration, that provides $3.3 billion annually in Foreign Military Financing plus $500 million per year in missile defense funding. The current MOU expires at the end of FY2028. That model is visible: Congress can debate it, the dollar amounts are public, and lawmakers who want to place conditions on aid have a clear procedural vehicle to try.

Ben Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute, argues the provision shifts the relationship into a different channel: Pentagon procurement, licensing agreements, co-production arrangements, and research pipelines where congressional oversight is limited and public accountability is minimal. In a brief titled “The Disappearing Aid Check,” Quincy Institute senior fellow Steven Simon put the structural argument plainly: moving support away from foreign-aid votes and into defense acquisition means it no longer appears on the political scoreboard where constituents can hold members accountable.

The American people don’t want it. Listen to your constituents, not your lobbyists. Strip out Section 224 from the NDAA.

Freeman, speaking to Military.com, made his position unambiguous. In his written analysis for the Quincy Institute, he argued that the initiative “would arguably do more to intertwine the U.S. military with the Israeli military than the more than $200 billion (inflation-adjusted) in military assistance Israel has received from the U.S. since its founding in 1948.”

Two specific phrases in the provision’s text drew the most pointed concern from Freeman: “network integration” and “data fusion.” Both appear without definitions. What they mean in practice, how far any synchronization of military data systems would extend, and whether intelligence data falls in scope are questions the current language does not answer.

Co-Production and the District Lock

Supporters of the provision frame it partly in economic terms. AIPAC’s factsheet says it “encourages U.S.-based co-production and manufacturing partnerships, strengthens domestic manufacturing, and supports American workers.” HASC chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL) described the measure as an efficiency improvement that gives American troops access to superior technology. Ranking member Adam Smith (D-WA) called critics’ characterizations “simply not accurate,” describing the initiative as a coordination mechanism for existing programs.

Freeman’s objection to the jobs framing is specific. He calls the co-production incentive the “real Trojan horse” in the bill: once Israeli-linked defense firms establish co-production facilities and joint ventures inside American congressional districts, those investments create local employment. Jobs become political assets. Lawmakers representing those districts become reluctant to vote against programs connected to local employers, regardless of how public opinion in their constituencies has shifted.

The F-35 program is the relevant model. Lockheed Martin deliberately distributed production across more than 40 states, assembling a coalition of congressional districts with a direct economic stake in keeping the contract funded. Critics of the provision say its co-production framework would replicate that logic specifically for the U.S.-Israel relationship, embedding it in district economies in a way that future floor fights over military assistance would find increasingly costly to disrupt.

AI, quantum machine learning, and advanced cyber research that the U.S. currently restricts even for close partners are also part of the initiative’s scope. Per the A New Policy legislative tracker’s analysis of the provision’s technology domains, those categories currently accessible only to the UK and Australia under AUKUS Pillar II would be opened to Israeli defense institutions under this framework.

The Committee Vote and What It Misses

Khanna offered his amendment at the June 4 HASC markup. The committee rejected it by voice vote. Only Khanna and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) spoke in favor of removal. Rogers defended the provision from the Republican side; Smith dismissed the critics’ characterizations as inaccurate and described the initiative as a coordination mechanism for programs that already exist.

Smith said he was “frustrated with Netanyahu’s leadership” and with Israel’s role in drawing the U.S. into the Iran war, but he disagreed that the provision represented Congress “bowing to what Netanyahu wants.”

Four days before the June 4 markup, the House passed the Iran war powers resolution 215 to 208, with four Republicans crossing to support it: Thomas Massie (KY), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA), Tom Barrett (MI), and Warren Davidson (OH). It was the fourth time such a measure came to a vote this year and the first time it cleared the House. Massie has separately committed to offering a floor amendment to strip the provision if it survived committee. It survived.

On the full House floor, members from competitive districts can’t shelter behind a voice vote; they register a position. That matters in November midterms where the Administration’s Middle East policy has already produced Republican defection on the Iran war, and where Democratic primary candidates from Michigan to California are running explicitly against U.S. military entanglement with Israel.

What Massie and Khanna Are Betting On

The Polling Numbers Behind the Floor Fight

The coalition Massie and Khanna have assembled spans the libertarian right and the progressive left, held together by opposition to expanded military integration with Israel and by survey data that has shifted sharply since the Iran war began in February. The March 2026 Pew Research Center survey and the May 2026 New York Times/Siena poll together trace the public opinion landscape the floor vote will enter:

The 60 percent Pew figure represents a nearly 20-point increase from where American opinion stood in 2022. The share choosing “very unfavorable” has nearly tripled, from 10 percent to 28 percent. Among Republicans under 50, a majority now views Israel unfavorably, a reversal of what had been a durable bipartisan foreign policy position for most of the past three decades.

AIPAC’s War Chest and the Midterm Math

AIPAC’s allied super PAC enters the midterms with nearly $100 million on hand, up from $35 million in 2022, and has spent more than $221 million on congressional races since it began engaging in competitive primaries, according to campaign finance data cited by The Intercept. Those resources have historically gone toward defending pro-Israel incumbents and defeating primary challengers critical of the relationship.

In the Senate, 40 members backed Bernie Sanders’ April 2026 resolution to block a $295 million bulldozer sale to Israel; just 15 voted for a comparable measure a year earlier. In midterm primaries from New York to California and in Midwestern swing districts, U.S. aid to Israel and AIPAC’s spending in congressional races have emerged as explicit campaign issues, per reporting by the Christian Science Monitor.

Netanyahu weighed in directly on June 1, writing to Rep. Marlin Stutzman to endorse a “new framework of joint defense cooperation, codevelopment, coproduction and mutual investment” as a successor to the current aid relationship. His letter landed during a midterm primary season where U.S.-Israel policy is generating constituent pressure across both parties. Responsible Statecraft described the underlying logic of the initiative as transforming Israel “from a top U.S. aid recipient to a full member of the U.S. defense and intelligence apparatus.”

The Senate Pathway and November

If the provision clears the House floor with the Massie-Khanna amendment defeated, the Senate still has to pass the same language. The agreement between the U.S. and Israel expires at the end of FY2028, creating pressure to formalize the relationship before that framework lapses and before a potentially different Congress takes over in January 2027.

The Arab Center Washington DC, in its analysis of the provision, concluded that even a future Congress committed to a different policy would face, by that point, a set of existing contractual agreements between American and Israeli defense companies, co-production jobs distributed across congressional districts, and Israeli technology embedded in Pentagon acquisition systems. Unwinding each of those structural attachments carries its own political and economic cost.

Whether the Senate’s documented shift on Israel-related military measures translates to opposition against language embedded in an NDAA is a different question from the arms-sale resolutions that have drawn the clearest votes. Those gave senators a narrow, visible statutory argument; NDAA language does not offer that framing.

Massie’s floor amendment will be the provision’s first recorded vote. The midterm election arrives in a political environment where the coalition that wrote Section 224 has shrunk measurably from where it stood when the agreement underpinning U.S. military aid to Israel was negotiated in 2016.