If you thought Santa was busy this time of year, you should see Congress. With just a handful of days left to finish this year’s business, members have their hands full with all of the legislative cans they kicked down the road. The House, at least, got at least one headache off its plate by passing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Wednesday afternoon — moving the bill one step closer to becoming law for its record-breaking 64th straight year.

As usual, the whole process was a nail-biter, thanks in part to the surprise victories House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) won in negotiations. The big ticket provision — a refusal to use taxpayer money to cover the gender transitions of the troops’ minor children — offended plenty of Democrats, who refuse to see the November elections as a referendum on their trans lunacy. Instead, they went to the floor to complain, as Rep. Mary Scanlin (D-Pa.) did, that Republicans somehow “hijacked the NDAA to rip health care away from servicemembers’ children.”

First off, this wasn’t the handiwork of rank-and-file Republicans — but the House speaker himself. This should be abundantly clear from House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers’s (R-Ala.) stunning reaction to the ground Johnson won on gender-mutilating care: “He didn’t talk to me about it.”

For two weeks, the Louisianan hammered out compromise language with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the White House behind closed doors, single-handedly rolling back — not just this Tricare insanity — but also diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, the absurd push for women in the draft, a radical (and destructive) expansion of in-vitro fertilization, and more.

Unfortunately, one thing Scanlin is right about is that servicemembers’ trans-identifying children are currently receiving these treatments. In a jaw-dropping exchange with a Stars and Stripes reporter, Democrat Rep. Adam Smith (Mass.), the ranking committee member on Armed Services, estimated that there are 6,000 to 7,000 children in our troops’ families undergoing gender treatments. Amy Haywood, a military spouse who worked as a senior legislative assistant in the House, couldn’t believe her eyes. “Wow. I knew it was high,” she tweeted, “but I didn’t know it was this high.”

Pressed on whether she thought Smith’s statistic was legitimate, Haywood said it’s entirely possible. “The numbers, in general, have exploded since 2017. Tricare began paying for all but pediatric surgery in 2016, but research shows that kids have been treated with ‘gender-affirming care’ for a long time.”

The reality is, Family Research Council’s Quena Gonzalez pointed out, even one is too many. If American taxpayers are fueling a cottage industry of gender mutilation on minors in our military, it must stop.

Smith disagrees, lobbing criticism at the Republican leader from the sidelines. “Speaker Johnson had a clear path to considering a bill that reflected the true spirit of bipartisan compromise that has ensured that Congress has provided for the common defense for the past 63 years,” Smith said. “Rather than take that path and ensure service members and military families get the support they need and deserve, he chose to pander to the most extreme elements of his party in an attempt to retain his speakership.”

The speaker stood his ground, saying matter-of-factly, “We banned Tricare from prescribing treatments that would ultimately sterilize our kids…” And if every Democrat doesn’t welcome this, every Republican should — whether they were surprised by the language or not. And yet, Rogers tried to punt the issue to the president-elect, wishing he’d done it all through executive order instead of a much stronger, federally-binding statute. “My preference would have been that we just let the president, on January 20, deal with these [issues].” Sounding more like Smith than Johnson, the chairman told The Hill, “This stuff does not belong in our bill.”

Ironically, Rogers thought “this stuff” did belong earlier this year when he (and every other Republican) voted for even more protective language that would have prohibited taxpayer-funding for all gender transition procedures in the military in the original House NDAA. When TWS contacted Rogers’s office to ask what had changed, we received no reply.

Haywood, for her part, traces some of this gender crisis to the radical indoctrination taking place in Defense Department schools. In an article for The Federalist, she accuses DOD of “forging a woke K-12 army” in base classrooms. At the end of the day, she explains, it’s tough to quantify — but the brainwashing is definitely happening.

“I don’t know how much Department of Defense Education Activity (DODEA) schools are fueling this,” Haywood told TWS, “because headquarters refuses to acknowledge congressional inquiries into DEI at overseas and domestic schools in the system. But,” she continued, “from the official teacher training DODEA teachers were given in 2021 that was exposed by the Claremont Institute and Open the Books, we know some activist educators are facilitating secret gender transitions at schools for American military children in Germany and Spain and have trained other educators in the Europe region to do the same.”

It’s been difficult, she points out, to get the same kind of traction that other communities have had in affecting education because military parents move every 18 months to two years, “which is part of the reason why this ideology has wormed its way in. But, just from my point of view,” Haywood continued, “I’m hearing from parents on a regular basis who’ve noticed what’s happening in military-dependent health care education and health care and are asking what they can do to push back. Unfortunately, when it comes to systems like DODEA, when parents go up against them alone, they are fighting against a phalanx of lawyers and simply cannot afford the legal fees that would eventually bleed them dry.”

While the military is still a conservative-leaning tradition, Haywood warns that the DOD — especially under Barack Obama and now Joe Biden — has a lot of power to shape support services for military families on bases, both domestically and overseas.” And, she adds soberly, “It is abundantly clear that activists have found a home in health care and education provided to military families, and policies from the very top have made it easy for them.”

In other words, there’s a lot left to be done to clean up the woke disaster Democrats have made of the military. Haywood believes this is a good first step. But to create long-term change, Congress needs to do more than stop the taxpayer funding of this ideology — as critical as that is. They need to rip it up from the roots.

“I would echo Senator-elect Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and 17 of his colleagues in the House who have called for a complete change of leadership at DODEA schools. This means replacing Director Narvaez and others who have presided over keeping secrets from parents,” Haywood insisted. “And I would support Rep. Mark Alford (R-Mo.) and nine other members of the House who have called for an investigation into why the military health system bars parents (and adolescents themselves) from accessing online medical records of children ages 13 to 17. The Defense Health Agency could change this policy on its own.” But these are things that she hopes will happen under a Trump administration.

Thankfully, Speaker Johnson gets it. Two years ago, FRC’s Dr. Jennifer Bauwens testified before Congress that “a growing body of evidence shows gender transition drugs and surgeries harm children. … [T]hese interventions are risky and unnecessary as there is also evidence that up to 94% of children experiencing gender dysphoria no longer suffer from it by adulthood.” She cited the number of countries that were even then moving away from inflicting gender transition procedures on confused children; that number has since grown. “I’m calling on you,” she concluded “to please act on behalf of children.”

The chairman of that subcommittee at the time was apparently listening. At the hearing he said

, “I’m gonna speak the truth here plainly, and I think the vast majority of the American people understand and agree with what I’m going to say: What you just heard there” from a surgeon who performs gender transition genital procedures on children “is a little sample of barbarism. This is the mutilation of children, and it should be prohibited by our law. … This is [about] adults deciding to permanently alter the bodies of children who do not have the capacity to make life-altering decisions on their own.”

“Here’s some more plain truth that everybody acknowledged until about 15 minutes ago,” he continued. “It’s been plainly observed and fully respected by every culture for all of recorded history: Sex isn’t something that you are assigned at birth; it is a natural, prenatal development that occurs when every unborn child is in the mother’s womb.”

“Chairman Johnson was right then, and Speaker Johnson is right now. Adults should protect kids,” Gonzalez insisted to TWS. In this case, “Protecting military kids — who already sacrifice so much for their parents’ service to their country — isn’t a radical new step but should be the absolute bare minimum common-sense policy. If the Department of Defense won’t defend military families, it’s good that Congress — under the leadership of Speaker Johnson — will, on behalf of the American people.”

Now that the NDAA has passed the House, it heads to the Senate, where Democrats are already bemoaning these protections, despite the fact that the Senate language also had protections for kids. The vote in the Senate will likely be next week.