Amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act aim to ensure our military has the right to repair its own equipment.
We’ve all been on the phone with tech support for frustratingly long periods of time. That’s bad enough. Now imagine being told “I have to put you on hold” while bullets are flying on a battlefield.
It may seem hard to believe, but it’s true: the same right to repair issues that plague everyday Americans – we should be able to fix our own stuff – is also an ongoing problem for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). And it’s proven to be a hard problem to solve.
On July 9, 2021, the President issued an Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy ordering the Secretary of Defense to submit a plan “for avoiding contract terms in procurement agreements that make it challenging or impossible for the Department of Defense or service members to repair their own equipment, particularly in the field.” The subsequent Department of Defense report, issued in February 2022, promised a forthcoming intellectual property guidebook that would “support and explain legal and practical challenges to acquiring the IP and associated IP rights to support the DoD mission, especially for developing, fielding, and sustaining weapon systems, including maintenance and repair.” As of today, that guidebook has still not been published.
Fortunately, Right to Repair champions in Congress are aware of the issue and are taking steps to solve it. In the House, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez (WA-03) offered an amendment to the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) noting that “it is integral that the military be able to fix its own equipment, and that efforts deliberately designed to prevent the military end user from fixing equipment in the field harm our nation’s military readiness” and ordering the Department of Defense to issue a response to the President’s Executive Order.
The 2025 NDAA has now moved to the Senate, where Sen. Warren (D-MA) has inserted a requirement that the Department of Defense may not enter into a procurement contract “unless the contractor agrees in writing to provide the Department of Defense fair and reasonable access to all the repair materials, including parts, tools, and information, used by the manufacturer or provider or their authorized partners to diagnose, maintain, or repair the good or service.”
There’s a long way to go, but if these provisions remain in the NDAA, we’ll be one step closer to a world where the military always has the right and the ability to repair its own devices both off and – most importantly – on the battlefield.
It's harder than it should be to fix our stuff. Manufacturers of every electronic product from toasters to tractors create barriers that stymie repair from owners or independent repair businesses. It's fueling a rise in electronic waste, the loss of independent repair businesses -- and ultimately more cost and more waste for consumers.
