House Bill Would Hide Billions More Dollars in U.S. Weapons Sales

According to our analysis of arms sales notifications in 2023, if these new minimums had been implemented last year, at least $635 million in sales would have been exempt from review. That figure includes sales of major defense equipment such as Sidewinder Missiles and Excalibur Tactical Projectiles. The total would likely reach billions within three years.

The current thresholds may already be obscuring as many as 95% of sales, worth billions of dollars. Rep. Kathy Manning (D-N.C.) said at the hearing, ​“We have seen examples of administrations making below threshold sales to avoid congressional scrutiny.” (Women for Weapons Trade Transparency submitted FOIA requests in March 2022 for data on under-threshold sales — they remain unfulfilled).

Waltz said that the bill would allow the U.S. ​“to stockpile high demand defense items” and accelerate delivery to key allies. ​“Nowhere is this more needed than for Taiwan Foreign Military Sales,” he added. 

He also argued that the defense industry was losing business: ​“Because this is such a bureaucratic process we literally have allies buying from other people and other countries rather than us. This is about jobs; this is about empowering allies to fight for themselves.”’

Democrats on the committee, however, raised concerns. The bill ​“would essentially eliminate congressional review for billions of dollars worth of arms transfers,” Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) said. Rep. Manning criticized the Department of Defense task force whose recommendations the bill drew from: “[While] the taskforce and the bill it produced consulted with many defense industrial firms and military officials, it did not take into account the views of civil society, human rights groups, legal scholars or government transparency groups.” 

Under the Arms Export Control Act of 1976, the executive branch must inform Congress about potential arms transfers or sales by the U.S. government or U.S. weapons manufacturers that surpass minimum thresholds. These notifications allow Congress to scrutinize arms sales, to place informal holds on them, or to introduce a joint resolution of disapproval, such as the November 16 resolution by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) opposing a proposed sale of precision guidance bomb kits to Israel. Notifications also enable researchers, journalists and the public to track and scrutinize weapons sales, as they are posted publicly in the Federal Register and on the Defense Security Cooperation Agency website.

The White House can override the notification process with an emergency certification for a sale, as President Biden and the State Department recently did with nearly 14,000 tank shells to Israel. But emergency certifications often generate media attention and opposition to executive branch overstep. 

H.R. 6609 would increase the amount of arms sales notifications slipping through already existing below-threshold cracks. Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) said at the hearing, ​“This is exactly the wrong direction we should be taking. We need to do more to increase congressional oversight, to prioritize human rights in arms sales, and to require end use monitoring mechanisms to track violations of human rights.”