Senate Rejects Program to Privatize Commissaries

The U.S. Senate has agreed to strike a provision in defense authorization legislation that would have created a pilot program to privatize some military commissary stores. The upper chamber voted 70-28 in favor of an amendment introduced by Sens. Jim Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, and Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland, to remove the privatization language from the fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA. Before the vote, the senators had pressed their colleagues to support their amendment to give the Defense Department more time to fully assess the effects and costs of the change. They cited a recent Pentagon report that concluded the program would hurt the purchasing power to achieve cost savings for military families and veterans. For more details, see this Military.com news article.