©2025 League of Conservation Voters
Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) sponsored an amendment to H.R. 2670, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2024, which would defund Department of Defense (DOD) educational and instructional activities on a wide range of subjects related to race and history, including parts of the United States Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Though nominally offered to promote racial neutrality, this amendment would harm understandings of the role race has played in historic and current events, raising the risk that damaging mistakes of history could be repeated or left unreconciled. It would do so at a time of sharp political divides over civil rights, voting rights, immigration from Latin America and Asia, policing of communities of color, anti-discrimination efforts in government as well as the private sector, and other important issues related to race. Overcoming racism requires acknowledging and learning from the past, not denying, minimizing, and concealing it, as this and numerous other extreme House amendments in 2023 attempted to do. On July 13, the House approved the Roy amendment by a vote of 227-201 (House roll call vote 309). The Roy amendment was not included in the final NDAA, which the president signed into law on December 22.
©2025 League of Conservation Voters