The Liberty Daily 
(The Daily Caller)—Congress is inching closer to deeply integrating America’s military-industrial complex with Israel’s national security state.
The Senate has proposed $300 million for a program that would benefit Tel Aviv in its version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), while the House version of the 2027 NDAA also includes a related proposal that would provide Israel with some of the U.S. military’s most advanced weapons and manufacturing technologies, along with a $300 million line item titled “Israeli Cooperative Programs.”
The bills passed through the armed services committees in both the House and the Senate. The House is planning to consider the bill on the floor by the week of June 29, while the Senate’s timeline remains unclear.
Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie is moving to strike the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative” in Section 219 of the 2027 NDAA, unveiling an amendment cosponsored by Democratic Reps. Ro Khanna and Rashida Tlaib, among others.
“The Massie-Khanna amendment to strip the US-Israel defense cooperation language out of the NDAA faces major hurdles,” Tori Bateman, Quincy Institute’s advocacy director, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Success is a long shot – but it isn’t out of the question here.”
“Section 224 [now Section 219] would mark a fundamental shift in U.S.-Israel defense cooperation,” Ben Freeman, the director of Democratizing Foreign Policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told the DCNF. “In many areas it would merge the U.S. and Israeli defense industrial bases.”
Massie called the provision dangerous in an X post on June 14.
“The swell of public opposition to this US-Israel defense cooperation language has been incredible,” Bateman told the DCNF. “There are so many constituents engaging in wonky Rules processes, memorizing provision numbers, and calling their Members’ offices. I can only hope that Members respect their constituents enough to let this amendment come up for a vote – and that they respect U.S. interests and congressional oversight enough to ultimately strip this provision from the bill.”
Freeman said that the initiative would reduce transparency in the U.S.-Israel relationship, noting that it calls for “network integration” and “data fusion” with the Israeli military.
“In other words, our data would literally become Israel’s data,” Freeman told the DCNF. “And this would be much less transparent than the current U.S.-Israel defense relationship, which relies primarily on military assistance that Congress at least has the opportunity to review every year, because it would all be happening inside the Pentagon’s bureaucracy.”
The legislation states that it will create “cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel, to expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation,” according to the House version of the 2027 NDAA.
“These provisions making it out of committee wasn’t surprising, because for so long this kind of legislation was so non-controversial,” Bateman told the DCNF. “What the movement of this legislation shows is the Members still have a very high appetite for something that is making their constituents sick to their stomach.”
The Senate NDAA provision is in Section 1217, titled “United States-Israel Framework for Upgraded Technologies, Unified Research, and Enhanced Security Act.” The Senate also proposed related legislation in the FUTURES Act on Feb. 12.
The FUTURES Act would authorize $450 million over three years for Israeli interests, but it has not made any progress since it was introduced.
AIPAC, GOP media relations, the Pentagon, and the Israeli Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
“The House language would install an ‘executive agent’ in the DoD to expand and accelerate US-Israel defense integration,” Bateman told the DCNF. “This is basically a promoter for the Israeli military industrial complex, installed in the Pentagon with precedence over other DoD component heads. It risks biasing our procurement processes, and integrating our supply chains in ways that are very costly and time-consuming to untangle if we needed to.”
It’s unclear what the program would cost American taxpayers, but through similar agreements in the past, Israel never paid a dime because it used U.S. taxpayer dollars to uphold its end of the deal, former U.S. Army headquarters staff officer David Pyne told the DCNF.
“The R&D programs we signed MOUs with Israel on were jointly developed and were supposed to be funded equally by the U.S. and Israel,” Pyne told the DCNF. “However, Israel always used Foreign Military Funding (FMF) dollars which came out of the over $3 billion a year, which we sent them each and [every] year, which means the projects were 100% funded by U.S. taxpayers.”
“The plan to shift away from direct aid, and into defense sector integration comes as the U.S. public is increasingly calling for more accountability in the US-Israel relationship and for the use of congressional oversight of that aid to bolster accountability,” Bateman told the DCNF. “The shift from direct aid to defense sector integration would make the US-Israel security relationship a lot harder for the American public to track, and it would take away an important mechanism the American public can use to put pressure on Israel when its interests clearly diverge from our own.”
This U.S.-Israel initiative moves to link the two nations at the hip for many of the newest and most important aspects of modern warfare, including directed-energy weapons (laser and microwave weaponry), cyber defense, electronic warfare, biotechnology, biomanufacturing, medical defense, AI, subterranean warfare and other emerging technologies, according to both versions of the 2027 NDAA.
“U.S. arms makers already have some partnerships with the Israeli defense sector,” Freeman told the DCNF. “This would put those collaborations on steroids and invite Israeli firms into the U.S. military-industrial complex more than ever before.”
The agreement hasn’t sounded alarm bells for all national security experts, with Joel Rayburn, a former senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, telling the DCNF that “the Israelis are becoming a closely trusted ally.”
“It comes at a time when the U.S. is benefiting greatly from Israel’s military technology innovations and their ability to rapidly adapt to threats such as the missiles and drones of the Iranian regime,” Rayburn told the DCNF. “Simply put, the U.S. has a lot to gain from being able to tap into Israeli creativity. Think of it as Israel’s most creative minds being enlisted to help the U.S. address our thorniest national security problems.”
“This is nothing more than codifying what has been happening for a long time,” Steven Bucci, visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF. “This makes great sense.”
‘Sold To China’
Pyne has long suspected that Tel Aviv sells critical U.S. technology to Beijing, drawing on his firsthand experience working with Israel and news reports.
“I was aware of a number of open-source news reports that Israel had been selling advanced U.S. military technology to the PRC [People’s Republic of China] during the 1990s on an extensive basis,” Pyne told the DCNF in an email. “In 2000, the U.S. expressed anger that it was doing so, and Israel has since curtailed its program to sell it to the PRC, although I have seen articles that Israel was caught trying to do so as recently as 2017 during the first Trump administration and was only stopped from doing so due to U.S. protests.”
During the Bush administration, officials in the White House and Congress said Israel allegedly provided U.S. military technology to China, the Los Angeles Times reported on June 13, 1990. However, this would be “difficult to prove,” the LA Times reported, citing U.S. and Asian diplomatic sources.
The alleged weapons sales from Israel to China took place only one year after arms transfers to Beijing were halted following the Tiananmen Square massacre, the LA Times reported, citing officials in the Bush administration and Congress.
“They (the Israelis) are moving in so many areas, it’s a matter of sort of limiting, somehow, those areas,” the LA Times reported, citing a senior Bush administration official. “They’ve opened this institute in Beijing which is facilitating a whole range of military-to-military cooperation between Israel and China.”
Although the Israeli government did not comment on the 1990 reporting from the LA Times, it denied sending military technology to China when the LA Times reported on the topic again on March 13, 1992. China and Israel now have a strong bilateral relationship, according to the Embassy of Israel in Beijing.
“The Chinese probably see Israel as a back door to U.S. technology that the United States won’t sell them,” the LA Times reported, citing Morton S. Miller, a retired State Department intelligence official.
A similar cooperative agreement between Israel and the U.S. was used in 2001 to develop the Arrow 2 missile interceptors; however, the U.S. allegedly did not receive the technology afterward, Pyne said in a post on X.
“I traveled to Israel as part of a Department of Defense delegation in June 2001 to negotiate an MOU [memorandum of understanding] to jointly develop the Arrow 2 missile defense system,” Pyne said in the X post. “But even though the program was 100 percent U.S. funded, Israel refused to share the technology with us. I suspect that they later sold the technology to Communist China as they have done with most other advanced military technology we have shared with them.
A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office in August 1993 warned that technology from the Arrow interceptors may have been transferred to a foreign country. The Israeli government denied the claim, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported on Aug. 26, 1993.
The United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative is not the only way funds are flowing to Israel through the new NDAA. The country could receive up to $670 million in potential outlays, according to the 2027 NDAA.
When Americans were asked in a recent survey about military aid to Israel, 40% said they would like to decrease aid, 27% said they would like to keep military aid at the same level and 11% said they would like to increase military aid, according to an April poll from YouGov and The Economist. The poll surveyed roughly 1,700 U.S. adult citizens with a 3.3% margin of error.
Israel remains the No. 1 recipient of U.S. aid as of 2026. An estimated $298 billion in aid has been sent to Israel between 1946 and 2024, according to the Congressional Research Service, citing State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development data as of January 2025.
The agreement within the proposed NDAA comes as the U.S. continues to fund the Iran War.
“And so now we think it [spending on the Iran War] is closer to 29 [billion dollars],” Department of War Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer Jules W. Hurst III said during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on May 12.
“This would unquestionably further entangle the U.S. with Israel–that’s actually the whole point of it,” Freeman told the DCNF. “So, if you’re concerned that Israel’s interests and actions are aligned with U.S. interests, then you should be very concerned about this becoming law.”
