Biotech boosters win big in both HASC, SASC defense policy bills for FY26

WASHINGTON — While the usual hot-button issues like Ukraine aid and the budget deficit dominated Tuesday’s marathon House Armed Services Committee markup of the annual defense policy bill, advocates of cutting-edge biotechnology quietly won passage of at least eight significant provisions to boost Pentagon use of biotech.

The specific items passed by HASC range from streamlined acquisition and bio-wargames to infrastructure expansion and ethics guidelines. The committee also added a total of $34 million for several categories of biotech research and data gathering.

The HASC bill comes hot on the heels of last week’s Senate Armed Services markup, whose bill’s full text — released Tuesday — includes at least four major pro-biotech provisions and adds $25 million in funding for biotech research and data. SASC also added $137 million in Military Construction (MILCON) funding for the Navy Research Lab’s Biomolecular Science & Synthetic Biology Laboratory, a facility not mentioned in the HASC bill.

Two of the SASC biotech provisions direct DoD to develop both a department-wide strategy to advance biotech and guidelines on “ethical and responsible development and deployment of biotechnology.” HASC has similar but not identical language.

The third SASC provision, which has no direct counterpart in the HASC bill, would create a “Biotechnology Management Office” run by a “senior official with relevant biotechnology experience” to develop the aforementioned strategy and coordinate biotech efforts across DoD. The fourth SASC provision, which was not mentioned in SASC’s official summary of the bill released last week, would empower the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) to coordinate biodefense with allied nations.

All told, the House and Senate versions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal 2026 show major momentum for biotechnology. They reflect many of the final recommendations released in April by the congressionally chartered National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NCSEB).

“This NDAA includes many recommendations from the comprehensive report we published last spring,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Pa., after the committee vote. Khanna is an NCSEB commissioner and the ranking Democrat on HASC’s subcommittee for Cyber, Innovative Technologies and Information Systems (CITI), which passed four of the biotech provisions as amendments. “While we have much more work to do, particularly in matters that fall under the jurisdiction of other committees, this is an important and meaningful first step,” he said.

“I am grateful to my colleagues on the SASC for their dedication to providing our men and women in uniform with the most cutting-edge tools and technologies,” said the NCSEB chairman, Sen. Todd Young, R-Pa., after last week’s Senate vote.

From Chemical Plants To Vats Of Microbes

A nuance worth noting about the current upsurge of support for biotech is how broad it is. After an initial boom of investment 10 years ago, biotech has largely narrowed down to the high-profit-margin medical applications, aka “biopharma,” which range from using microbes to brew novel medications to bleeding captured horseshoe crabs to test vaccines.

But there are a lot of other ways to apply biological processes that have been “dying on the vine” for lack of investment. “It’s not just a health technology,” the NCSEB’s executive director, Caitlin Frazer, told Breaking Defense. “It’s going to fundamentally transform our defense supply chains [and] reduce our dependence on inputs from countries that are our adversaries.”

In particular, the Pentagon is interested in what’s called “biomanufacturing.” In essence, that means using big vats of microbes to brew useful industrial chemicals, for everything from anti-corrosion coatings to novel explosives, that replace or improve upon substances that today can only be mass-produced in energy-intensive petrochemical plants.

“If you’re thinking about plastics and textiles and chemicals … all kinds of things could be made with biology,” Frazer told Breaking Defense.

In recent years, the Pentagon has sought to jumpstart biomanufacturing, in particular by funding efforts to scale up processes that look promising in the lab and see if they are viable for mass production. But the official requirements and military specifications that drive military procurement were largely written without biotech in mind and often effectively rule out using biomanufactured material by prescribing traditional processes instead.

One of the HASC provisions aims to sweep away these restrictions, and many other provisions explicitly emphasize biomanufacturing.

“There are really amazing innovations happening in [military] services’ labs, in startup companies that want to be part of the defense industrial base,” Frazer said. “But how do we pull that technology, those ideas, those innovations through the Technology Readiness Levels and get them to the point where they are scaled and ready to be integrated into a weapons system or a supply chain?”