The U.S. House of Representatives is considering rival proposals either to end mandatory registration for a possible military draft or to grant sweeping and unprecedented authority to the Selective Service System (SSS) to collect and aggregate personal information from other government databases to try to automatically construct a list of all draft-eligible young men to be used as the basis for induction orders if Congress activates a draft.
The proposal by the SSS for automated creation of a registry of potential draftees from other government databases is included in the version of the annual National Defense [sic] Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2026 which was reported by the House Armed Services Committee and will be the starting point for discussion of this year’s NDAA on the House floor later this month, beginning perhaps as soon as next week.
The alternative proposal to end draft registration and abolish the SSS is contained in one of more than a thousand proposed amendments to the House Armed Services Committee version of the NDAA that have been submitted to the House Rules Committee.
The House Rules Committee will meet sometime the week of September 8, 2025, to decide which of these proposed amendments to the NDAA will be voted on by the full House of Representatives.
Opponents of the draft and of the unprecedented personal data grab incorporated in the proposal for automated database-derived draft registration should contact U.S. Representatives and urge them to co-sponsor and support Amendment 231 to H.R. 3838 to repeal the Military Selective Service Act, and press members of the House Rules Committee to allow a floor vote on this amendment.
As has often been the case with opposition to military conscription, the Selective Service repeal amendment is sponsored by an unusual bipartisan group of Representatives including Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY), Rep. Mark Pocan, (D-WI, chair of the House LGBTQ caucus and chair emeritus of the House Progressive Caucus), and Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH, military veteran and West Point graduate).
Amendment 231 to H.R. 3838 includes the same text that has been introduced in each session of Congress since 2019 as an amendment to the annual NDAA and/or as the standalone Selective Service Repeal Act.
The current draft law in effect since 1980 requires all male (as assigned at birth, regardless of current gender identification) U.S. residents (including undocumented immigrants, green-card holders, and holders of resident visas, but excluding holders of “non-resident” visas including long-term student visas and type-H visas for “temporary” workers) ages 18 through 25 to register with the SSS and report to the SSS within 10 days each time they change their address.
Many states have chosen to require draft-age men to register with the SSS in order to obtain state-issued driver’s licenses. But in states without laws like this — including California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oregon, and several less populous states — compliance with the registration requirement is low. And “absolutely nobody”, in the words of the Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, tells the SSS when they move.
The registration law is unenforced and unenforceable. A criminal prosecution, of which there have been none since 1986, would require proving to a jury that nonregistration by a particular person was “knowing and willful”, which it rarely is and for which there is almost never any evidence. The SSS registration list is incomplete, inaccurate, and has become — in the testimony of the former director of the SSS who presided over the establishment of the current system in 1980 — “less than useless” for an actual draft.
If he Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were genuinely concerned with government waste and inefficiency, DOGE would have recommended abolishing the SSS as unfit for anything more than a charade of “preparedness” for a draft that the agency would be unable to carry out effectively.
But despite having obtained access to the SSS registration database neither DOGE nor the Trump 2.0 regime has taken any other public action or publicly stated any position with respect to the SSS or the draft, allowing holdover civil servants to continue to manage the SSS by inertia.
The proposal by the SSS to Congress for authority to try to automate the compilation from other government databases of a comprehensive and up-to-date of potential draftees and their current postal addresses (to send induction notices by provable, signed-for delivery of certified letters in the event of a draft) is a last resort by SSS staff to head off loss of their sinecures if their agency is abolished as obsolete and unfit for purpose.
Automatic draft registration sounds simple, if you don’t look too closely at what it would require. In practice, it would be both unworkable and dangerous.
Data matching is hard and — as other DOGE projects have shown — error-prone, especially when databases or personal information are used for purposes unrelated to those for which they were collected. You can’t “automate” a task like this by waving a magic wand.
Whether a person is eligible for the draft or required to register with the SSS depends on a complex set of factors including sex as assigned at birth and immigration and visa status.
Most birth records are state rather than Federal, and both state and Federal records may reflect current gender identification (or none in the case of those with “X” rather than “M” or F” gender markers on birth certificates, driver’s licenses, and/or passports) rather than sex as assigned at birth.
Constructing a draft registration list would inevitably and unavoidably require the SSS to acquire and try to integrate comprehensive records from any available Federal source about each young person’s immigration and visa status and sex as assigned as birth, and interrogate and demand answers from each young person for which those records are ambiguous, contradictory, inconclusive, or absent.
The proposal for automatic registration would override the Privacy Act and the Computer Matching Act to empower the SSS to demand any records, individually or in bulk, from any other Federal agency, if the Director of the SSS in their (apparently unreviewable) judgement thinks those records might help identify or locate potential draftees. And potential draftees would be required to provide personal information on demand of the SSS — a telling provision which wouldn’t be needed if they could actually be identified and located “automatically”.
No Federal agency has ever been given such broad authority to aggregate and integrate such sensitive personal information from all other Federal agencies. And nothing in the proposal for “automatic” draft registration would restrict future access, data mining, or misuse of this data trove by DOGE or any other agency.
This proposal probably wasn’t designed as a stealth data grab using the SSS as a proxy for DOGE, but that would be its effect. This didn’t originate with the White House, but it’s the most significant and dangerous legislative proposal for expansion of Federal data-aggregation authority since Trump’s re-election.
Privacy advocates should support abolition of the SSS as the alternative to such and expansion of its power.
Anti-militarists and advocates for genuinely realistic military planning and policy (not the dangerous fantasies of the self-styled realist faction of war-hawks) should also support abolishing the SSS and putting an end to its charade of preparedness to activate a draft.
Contingency planning and preparation for a draft including maintaining a list of potential draftees serves to enable and encourage more belligerent military policy, not national defense or deterrence. It allows warmongers to avoid thinking about whether enough people would be willing to fight the wars they are planning, provoking, or risking, since they can pretend, or even convince themselves, that the draft is always available as a last-resort “fallback” if recruiting for an unpopular war falls short. Ending draft registration and abolishing the SSS would constrain war-planners and war-makers by removing from the U.S. arsenal one of the supporting pillars of endless, unlimited war.
Either attempted automation or repeal of draft registration would be the largest change in U.S. planning and preparation for a draft since 1980. But there’s never been a committee hearing or floor debate in the House or the Senate on either of these proposals.
The Senate is already moving to floor debate on its version of the NDAA. But neither the version of the NDAA reported by the Senate Armed Services Committee nor, so far as we can tell, any of the Senate floor amendments proposed to date includes either “automatic” draft registration or Selective Service repeal. So whichever option the House chooses, the issue will go to the House-Senate conference committee on the NDAA.
In 2016, 2021, 2022, and again in 2024, proposals for major changes to the Military Selective Service Act included in the Senate and/or House versions of the annual NDAA were removed from the final compromise version of the bill agreed to behind closed doors by the conference committee and enacted into law. That might happen again, with Congress choosing yet again to punt the future of Selective Service into next year. But there’s no guarantee.
Opponents of the draft need to turn up the pressure on the House now to replace the proposal in the NDAA for automatic draft registration with Amendment 231 to H.R. 3838 to finally repeal the Military Selective Service Act, and work to get the Senate conferees to agree to Selective Service repeal.
Edward Hasbrouck maintains the Resisters.info website and publishes the “Resistance News” newsletter. He was imprisoned in 1983-1984 for organizing resistance to draft registration.
