December 14, 2023

Earlier today, the House followed the Senate in passing H.R. 2670, the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), sending the bill to the President who is expected to sign it into law. The bill includes a modified version of H.R. 2886, the “Base Access Privileges Improvement Act,” which SWACCA developed with Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) in 2022 to make more uniform and consistent the access standards for Defense Department (DOD) contractors and others who perform work on military installations across the country. SWACCA successfully lobbied to have this language included in the House version of NDAA approved on July 14.

In the final bill and accompanying Conference Report, the Defense Department is directed to issue interim guidance within 30 days for determining the fitness of individuals for access to military installations, with final guidance to be issued within 180 days of the NDAA being signed into law. House and Senate conferees noted that they remained concerned by DOD’s “slow progress” in addressing longstanding base access challenges, and that a key improvement “would be the development of a DOD-wide fitness standard for installation access that applies evenly and routinely across all services and military installations in the United States.”

SWACCA is grateful for the leadership of Rep. Garamendi and lead cosponsor Rep. Donald Norcross (D-NJ) on this important legislation and for securing the compromise language in this year’s NDAA.

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