Presidential signing statement on the FY2026 NDAA

Accompanying the signature on S. 1071, the statement characterizes the Act as codifying aspects of more than a dozen of the administration's executive orders and actions, and as "eliminating funding for wasteful and radical programs that undermine the warfighting ethos." It then objects on constitutional grounds to roughly forty to fifty enumerated sections — chiefly congressional reporting and pre-notification requirements, restrictions on the President's control of personnel and materiel (secs. 915(a), 1046(a)), security-clearance directives (sec. 6504), and recommendation-of-legislation clauses — reserving authority to treat them as advisory. The statement does not object to section 559A or section 901, and does not mention transgender people, gender identity, or DEI by name. For a discriminatory-purpose analysis the statement is probative in two directions: it identifies the statute as the codification vehicle for the executive-order program, and it shows the provisions targeting transgender people were among those the President accepted without reservation.