The idea of a “right to repair” — a requirement that companies facilitate consumers’ repairs, maintenance, and modification of products — is extremely popular, even winning broad, bipartisan support in Congress. That could not, however, save it from the military–industrial complex.
Lobbyists succeeded in killing part of the National Defense Authorization Act that would have given service members the right to fix their equipment in the field without having to worry about military suppliers’ intellectual property.
“Defense contractors have a lot of influence on Capitol Hill.”
The decision to kill the popular proposal was made public Sunday after a closed-door conference of top congressional officials, including defense committee chairs, along with Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D.
Those meetings were secret, but consumer advocates say they have a pretty good idea of what happened.
“It’s pretty clear that defense contractors opposed the right-to-repair provisions, and they pressed hard to have them stripped out of the final bill,” said Isaac Bowers, the federal legislative director at U.S. PIRG. “All we can say is that defense contractors have a lot of influence on Capitol Hill.”
The idea had drawn bipartisan support in both the House and Senate, which each passed their own versions of the proposal.
Under one version, co-sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mt., defense companies would have been required to supply the information needed for repairs — such as technical data, maintenance manuals, engineering drawings, and lists of replacement parts — as a condition of Pentagon contracts.
The idea was that no service member would ever be left waiting on a contractor to fly in from Norway to repair a simple part — which once happened — or, in another real-life scenario, told by the manufacturer to buy a new CT scanner in a combat zone because one malfunctioned.
Instead of worrying about voiding a warranty, military personnel in the field could use a 3D printer or elbow grease to fix a part.
“The military is a can-do operation,” Bowers said. “Service members can and should be able to repair their own equipment, and this will save costs if they can do it upfront and on time and on their schedule.”
“Contractor Profiteering”
Operations and maintenance costs are typically the biggest chunk of the Pentagon’s budget, at 40 percent. That is in large part because the military often designs new weapons at the same time it builds them, according to Julia Gledhill, a research analyst for the national security reform program at the Stimson Center.
“We do see concurrent development, wherein the military is designing and building a system at the same time,” Gledhill said on a webinar hosted by the nonprofit Taxpayers for Common Sense on Tuesday. “That, turns out, doesn’t work very well. It means that you do discover design flaws, what the DOD would characterize as defects, and then you spend a whole lot of money trying to fix them.”
For the defense industry, however, the proposal threatened a key profit stream. Once companies sell hardware and software to the Pentagon, they can keep making money by forcing the government to hire them for repairs.
Defense lobbyists pushed back hard against the proposal when it arose in the military budgeting process. The CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association claimed that the legislation could “cripple the very innovation on which our warfighters rely.”
The contractors’ argument was that inventors would not sell their products to the Pentagon if they knew they had to hand over their trade secrets as well.
In response, Warren wrote an unusual letter last month calling out one trade group, the National Defense Industrial Association.
“NDIA’s opposition to these commonsense reforms is a dangerous and misguided attempt,” Warren said, “to protect an unacceptable status quo of giant contractor profiteering that is expensive for taxpayers and presents a risk to military readiness and national security.”
As a piece of legislation, the right to repair has likely died until next year’s defense budget bill process. The notion could be imposed in the form of internal Pentagon policies, but it would be a less of a mandate: Such policies can be more easily waived.
The secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force have all expressed some degree of support for the idea, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has urged the branches to include “right to repair” provisions in new contracts going forward — though, for now, it’s just a suggestion rather than legal requirement.
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