Navy Secretary Nominee Commits to Studying Right to Repair

John Phelan, President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Navy, committed to studying military Right to Repair during his February 27, 2025 hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Mr. Phelan’s commitment comes after Army Secretary Dan Driscoll expressed his unequivocal support for the army’s right to repair the equipment it procures during his own nomination hearing. 

We have noted before that the United States military shares the same Right to Repair problems that plague ordinary Americans: we can’t fix our own stuff! Instead, companies require us to go directly to them or their authorized dealers even for repairs as simple as changing a battery.

This is great for the companies as they can monopolize repair and lock in higher prices and ongoing profits. But it’s bad for consumers. And it’s bad for the planet – as the cost of repairing a product increases, many people simply throw away their old item and get a new one. 

Thanks to this corporate culture of disposability, Americans discard 416,00 cellphones every day and more than 162 Empire State Buildings’ worth of electronics are discarded annually. As a result, electronic waste is the fastest growing and most toxic waste stream in the U.S and the world.

Disposing of that many electronic items is absurd. Equally absurd consequences occur when the military cannot repair its own equipment: hundreds of billions of taxpayers dollars are wasted; we cannot train our troops to repair their own equipment; and  we put servicemembers lives at risk during exercises or in combat. As Senator Warren points out during Mr. Phelan’s hearing:

• The Navy spends millions of dollars and delays missions to fly contractors out to make repairs to its Littoral Combat Ships because Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics don’t let the Navy have access to the necessary repair data and materials.
• According to the Government Accountability Office, Navy technicians are denied the information they needed to properly calibrate fuel tank level indicators on the USS Fort Lauderdale and have to fly the contractor’s technicians out every time recalibration is necessary. 
• Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Wicker report, Restoring Freedom’s Forge,  demonstrated that the Department of Defense “consistently underperforms in procuring data rights” and that “lack[ing] sufficient technical data” is a factor in “reduced training and readiness.”

These examples are emblematic of the reasons U.S. PIRG supports the military’s right to repair its own equipment and the Servicemember Right-to-Repair Act. This common-sense legislation – introduced by Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-03) in the House and Senator Warren (D-MA) in the Senate in the last Congress – reforms Department of Defense (DOD) procurement rules to ensure military service personnel are able to repair the equipment they rely on during daily operations, training exercises, and on active combat duty. U.S. PIRG will support that legislation when it is reintroduced in the new 119th Congress. 

In the meantime, Mr. Phelan committed himself to “study[ing] and look[ing] at” the military’s right to repair its own equipment. If you want to watch Mr. Phelan’s’s nomination hearing, it is available here. Senator Warren’s questions on Right to Repair begin approximately 1:21:00 into the hearing.