Congress Hands the Pentagon a Free Pass on PFAS

The U.S. Senate and House have now passed their versions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2026. The next step is a conference committee to reconcile differences before the bill goes to the President.

But on PFAS, the matter is already settled. Both versions contain powerful, dangerous, and reckless provisions, inserted at the Pentagon’s urging, that will weaken what little protection existed for human health and the environment from the U.S. military’s well-documented PFAS contamination. We’ll examine two sections from each bill to understand this legislative terrorism. The DOD is off the hook.

I taught civics in a Maryland public high school in the early 1980s, emphasizing the difference between how government works in theory and how it works in practice.

I taught my students that the slaveholder Thomas Jefferson stressed certain virtues of citizenship: education, participation, vigilance, decentralization of power, and resistance to government overreach, among them.  Jefferson was the original American Antifa.