The Military Almost Got the Right to Repair. Lawmakers Just Took It Away
U.S. lawmakers have removed provisions from the National Defense Authorization Act for 2026 that would have guaranteed service members the right to repair their own equipment.
The final text of the NDAA was shared by the House Armed Services Committee on Sunday, after weeks of delays that pushed the annual funding bill to the end of the year. Among a host of other language changes made as part of reconciling different versions of legislation drafted by the Senate and House of Representatives, two provisions focused on the right to relief – Section 836 of the Senate bill and Section 863 of the House bill – were both removed. Section 1832 of the House version of the bill also disappeared, as repair advocates feared it would implement a “data-as-a-service” relationship with defense contractors that would have forced the military to pay for subscription repair services.
As WIRED reported in late November, lobbying efforts by defense contractors appear to have succeeded in convincing lawmakers who led the conference process, including Mike Rogers, a Republican from Alabama and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and ranking member Adam Smith of Washington, to strip the remedial provisions, which had bipartisan support and were championed by the Trump administration, from the law.
The ruling is a blow to the broader right-to-repair movement, which advocates for policies that make it easier for device users, owners, or third parties to work on and repair devices without needing to obtain (or pay for) manufacturer approval. But while guaranteeing military repair rights has not been the final solution, competing efforts to make the military dependent on repair-as-a-service subscription plans have not been successful either.
“For decades, the Pentagon has relied on a broken acquisition system that is routinely defended by career bureaucrats and corporate interests,” wrote Senators Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Tim Sheehy, Republican of Montana, in a joint statement shared with WIRED. Both support right-to-repair efforts and are responsible for the language in the Senate version of the NDAA. “Reforms to the military’s right to repair are supported by the Trump White House, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of the Navy, contractors, small businesses and our brave service members. The only ones who oppose this common-sense reform are those who profit from a broken status quo at the expense of our warfighters and taxpayers,” they say.
The NDAA is an annual legislative act that has far-reaching implications for everything from military budgets to how states can implement AI regulations. The House Armed Services Committee on Sunday released a summary of the text of the 2026 NDAA titled “Implementing President Trump’s Peace Through Force Agenda.” It focuses on “conservative victories” like President Donald Trump’s “efforts to end left-wing ideology, wokism, and DEI in the military and restore focus on lethality, meritocracy, and accountability.”
The reparations provisions may seem relatively minor compared to other aspects of the bill, but they have potentially outsized consequences, given the U.S. military’s long history of innovative technologies making their way into civilian life. (The Internet, for example.) Proponents of repair worry that limiting what the military can do in the field will limit the innovations resulting from on-the-fly repair.
