1,396 Amendments, Zero Votes: What the FY27 NDAA's Collapse Reveals About Who Gets Heard in the House

By James · July 6, 2026 · ~10 minute read · Data: the leg.pub legislative record, updated continuously; status as of July 4, 2026

The House spent fourteen minutes on the afternoon of June 30 destroying six weeks of work by two-thirds of its own members.

The vote came on H.Res. 1398, the special rule that would have brought H.R. 8800, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2027, to the floor. It failed 198–224, with 14 Republicans joining every voting Democrat (Roll no. 231). Rules almost never fail; when one does, everything scheduled behind it stops. Leadership canceled the rest of the week and sent the House home early for the July 4 recess.

The wreckage buried 1,396 amendments that members had drafted, filed, and lobbied for, including 312 the Rules Committee had approved for floor votes the night before. Every one now sits in limbo.

This is the story the amendment data tells: what those 1,396 amendments wanted, who got through the gate and who didn't, how dramatically that gate narrowed over the past decade, and why some members who won the most floor votes chose to burn the process down anyway.

How an NDAA amendment pile gets built

The NDAA is the last reliably enacted policy bill in Congress, with 65 consecutive years of enactment, which makes it the vehicle everyone tries to board. The FY27 cycle ran on schedule until it didn't:

• May 26: Rogers and Smith release the FY27 text and announce the markup (HASC Democrats).
• June 4–5: House Armed Services marks up for roughly 14 hours, processes about 900 amendments, and reports the bill 44–12 with a topline near $1.15 trillion (Roll Call). Our record includes 159 amendment texts posted for the markup itself.
• June 11: Rules posts Committee Print 119–33, the base text for floor amendments, and opens its submission portal.
• June 11–29: Members file 1,396 floor amendments. The total spans 293 distinct lead sponsors, about two-thirds of the entire House.
• June 29: Rules meets, makes 312 amendments in order, and reports H.Res. 1398 on an 8–4 party-line vote. The rule also bundles three other measures, including the FY27 State Department appropriations bill.
• June 30: The rule fails on the floor. No amendment gets a vote.

The submission pile rewards a close look. Filing late is common and mostly tolerated: 286 amendments arrived after the deadline, and 59 of them still made the list. Revision serves as the real negotiation channel. Rules approved 102 of the 312 made-in-order amendments only after a revision, typically following informal feedback from committees or leadership. The process even has a formal way of saying "no comment": members withdrew 58 amendments, and staff stamped a dozen of them NOT REVIEWABLE, the Rules Committee's marker for submissions so far outside the bill's scope it declined to process them.

What 1,396 amendments want

Amendment summaries map, in real time, what members think defense policy is for. Here is the FY27 topic distribution, stratified by party. Cells show amendments filed → made in order:

The pattern is unmistakable. China ranks as both the biggest topic and a safe one. Hawkishness toward Beijing remains the last true bipartisan defense position, so amendments like Rep. McDowell's (R-NC) Taiwan cyber-defense strategy or the Ogles–Tenney plan to include Taiwan in RIMPAC 2028 sailed through. Note who owns the consensus, though: Republicans and bipartisan coalitions supplied 75 of the 85 China filings, and Democrats went 0 for 10 on their own. Drones and counter-UAS did even better proportionally. Nobody wants to be on record against counter-drone technology after two years of drone-incursion headlines.

Ukraine, Israel, and Iran show the mirror image. Members filed those amendments constantly; Rules approved them almost never. Democrats and cross-party coalitions wrote most of them: 43 of the 53 Israel-related filings and 37 of the 48 on Ukraine. These questions split both parties internally, which is precisely why Rules kept them off the floor. The exceptions are telling. Rules made Rep. Eli Crane's (R-AZ) amendment prohibiting Ukraine Security Assistance funds in order; leadership was willing to let restrictionists have that fight. The committee rejected the Massie–Khanna–McGovern–Tlaib amendment striking the bill's U.S.–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, even after a revision cycle. That coalition ran from Thomas Massie to Rashida Tlaib, and it still could not buy a vote on Israel policy.

The National Guard row splits hardest along party lines. Republicans went 9 for 16, mostly on structural items like Austin Scott's Guard Bureau leadership fixes. Democrats filed mostly to restrain domestic deployments, from D.C. funding prohibitions to governor-consent requirements, and went 1 for 11. Their lone survivor extends a training facility project in Alabama.

Culture-war amendments were fewer than the headlines suggest: five DEI-related submissions and nine touching gender. They punch above their weight in floor drama, though. Rules made the Mace–Tenney amendment barring TRICARE coverage of gender-related care in order, and it would have been among the most contentious votes of the week.

The NDAA also remains Congress's junk drawer. Rep. Chip Roy (TX) won a slot for a late, revised amendment conditioning funds to Mexico on approval of the NovoFly sterile-fly strain, a New World screwworm eradication measure riding on a trillion-dollar defense bill.

Who gets through the gate

Start with the aggregate party numbers, because they frame everything else:

Democrats filed nearly as many amendments as Republicans and received about a fifth as many slots. The 43 Democratic survivors share a genre: almost every one is a report, a study, a briefing requirement, or a pilot program. Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-MI) went 6 for 23, the best Democratic record this cycle, and won studies on ultrasound therapies, neuroimaging for traumatic brain injury, and child development center construction. Those are worthy items. But compare them with what Republican amendments got to do: prohibit funding streams, restrict TRICARE coverage, mandate border deployments. That gap marks the difference between commenting on policy and making it.

The individual leaderboard shows how concentrated success is:

• Austin Scott (R-GA) filed 39 and got 27 made in order. He sits high on Armed Services, and committee seniority remains the single best predictor of amendment success.
• Kat Cammack (R-FL) went 10 for 22, and Vern Buchanan (R-FL) went 10 for 20 in the next tier.
• Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) offers the most instructive Democratic record. He filed 32, the second-most of any member, and got 5 through, the most of any Democrat. He has filed 127 amendments over seven straight NDAAs. He wins by volume, bipartisan cosponsors, and unobjectionable topics.

The shutout list isn't random either. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) filed 26 amendments; zero were made in order. Brad Sherman (D-CA) filed 22; zero. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) filed 5; zero.

The ten-year narrowing

Our record covers every NDAA amendment cycle back to FY18, which lets us put this one in context. This is the table that should worry anyone who cares about the House as a deliberative body:

Three trends stack on top of each other.

First, the gate narrowed for everyone. Democratic majorities of 2020–2022 gave floor votes to more than half of all submitted amendments. The rate has stayed under a quarter since 2023. Even majority-party members saw their success rate cut nearly in half. This isn't only partisanship; it's floor-time triage as the amendment pile tripled from 440 to roughly 1,400.

Second, minority access keeps declining across majorities. Follow the minority-party column. Democrats got 38% of their amendments in order under the Republican majority of FY18. Republicans under Democratic majorities got 32%, then 34%, then 23%. Democrats since 2023 have gotten 14%, 16%, 9%, and 8.5%. Each majority has treated the previous one's floor as a ceiling to undercut. Members respond rationally. If amendments are lottery tickets, you buy more of them. That's why Tlaib went from 15 submissions in FY23 (9 made in order) to 26 in FY27 (zero), and why the pile keeps growing as its purpose shifts from legislating to signaling.

Third, the bipartisan premium is gone, and almost nobody has noticed. Recruiting a cross-party cosponsor used to be the best investment in Congress. Bipartisan amendments were made in order at rates up to 70% under Democratic majorities, better than the majority's own. That premium has inverted since 2023. Bipartisan amendments now do barely better than minority-party ones: 18% this cycle, versus 38% for Republican-only. Congress has repealed the procedural reward for coalition-building.

Individual careers trace the same arc. Take Norton's amendment giving D.C.'s mayor the same National Guard authority as governors, freshly relevant after two years of federalized Guard deployments in the District. It got floor votes in FY22 and FY23. She has now filed it, plus her other Guard measures, in four straight NDAAs under this majority: 27 submissions since FY24, zero made in order. Nothing changed but the gavel.

The paradox of June 30

Which brings us back to the floor. The 14 Republican rebels weren't shut out of the process; several ranked among its biggest winners. The 13 substantive holdouts had filed 72 amendments and gotten 26 made in order, a 36% success rate, better than the chamber average. (Majority Leader Steve Scalise switched his vote to "no" to preserve a motion to reconsider.) Crane went 5 for 7, including his Ukraine amendment. Lauren Boebert went 5 for 11, Chip Roy 5 for 11, Anna Paulina Luna 4 for 12.

They voted to kill their own floor votes. Luna and Roy led the group's demand: write the SAVE America Act, the administration's voter-ID bill, directly into the NDAA text. They rejected Speaker Johnson's plan to "MIRV" the two bills together after separate passage (The Hill, NOTUS). Luna called the merge plan a "procedural head fake," since the Senate could simply peel the rider off. Others were protesting stalled promises on the H.R. 2 border package (Time). It was the second consecutive week the majority's own members froze the floor (Washington Times).

There's a data lesson in the paradox. When 78% of amendments die at Rules and survivors get curated for the majority's comfort, an amendment made in order loses value, even to its own sponsor. The rebels did the math. They valued 26 floor votes on defense studies and funding prohibitions less than one hostage-taking opportunity on an unrelated priority. A process that devalues amendments eventually devalues the rule that carries them.

What to watch after July 13

The House returns July 13, and the mechanics matter:

1. Scalise's motion to reconsider is pending. If leadership cuts a deal with the holdouts, the same rule, and the same 312 amendments, can come back up quickly. Watch whether the rule returns as-is or whether Rules meets again. A new rule means a new amendment list, and we will track every difference the moment it posts.
2. Watch for a self-executed SAVE Act. If Johnson concedes to "baking in" the voter-ID text, expect it via a self-executing provision in a revised rule. That move would hand Democrats a new reason to oppose final passage and complicate the committee's 44–12 bipartisan launch.
3. The Senate is not waiting. Senate Armed Services has filed its own FY27 report language. Each frozen week shifts leverage toward the Senate's version in conference.
4. The amendment pile is still open. Rules kept the FY27 submission table live; late submissions continued arriving through July 4 in our data. A new rule could grow the list of 312, or shrink it.

The FY27 NDAA will almost certainly pass eventually; it always does. But the amendment record measures a quieter change better than anything else we have. The House floor once let 293 members' ideas compete. That space has shrunk for a decade, under both parties, and this year it shrank, for six days and counting, to zero.

Methodology: This analysis draws on longitudinal data captures from the official records: eight NDAA amendment cycles, FY18 through FY27, with statuses as of July 4, 2026. Topic counts come from keyword scans of the official summaries; party labels follow the committee's designations.

Sources: Clerk of the House, Roll no. 231 · Congress.gov, H.R. 8800 · House Rules Committee, H.R. 8800 · Roll Call · The Hill · NOTUS · Time · Washington Times · HASC Democrats