On Thursday, October 9, as the Congress proved powerless to affect the government shutdown caused by a lack of general appropriations since September 30, the U.S. Senate nonetheless made an evening’s work of the massive annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal 2026.

This bill (S. 2296) started out as a 1,454-page bill authorizing every facet of the Pentagon’s annual budget. It left the floor a much larger bill after a flurry of amendments were adopted. In particular, the Senate adopted a large en bloc package of amendments including amendment#3742, the Coast Guard reauthorization bill for fiscal years 2025-2026.

The text of the Coast Guard bill that was attached to the NDAA is here.

The House passed its own Coast Guard bill, H.R. 4275, on July 23 and the text of that different bill is here. The job of the two chambers now is to agree on one compromise text. Given that the Senate version is part of the must-pass NDAA bill, we expect that the final version will be negotiated as part of that package, rather than as a stand-alone bill that would be competing for scarce floor time on its own at the end of the session.