Future of Selective Service goes to House-Senate conference — again

 By Edward Hasbrouck

 

Reprinted by permission from the "Resisters.info" website and blog October 14, 2025 at: https://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/002800.html  See this article with links at this link.

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 Following approval by the House and Senate of different versions of an annual military policy bill, the future of the Selective Service System (SSS) will be decided behind closed doors by a House-Senate conference committee — for the sixth time in the last ten years.

 When the Federal government shut down most agencies and activities at the start of October 2025, the SSS stayed in operation and continued to register young men for a possible military draft. Maintaining a fiction of readiness to activate military conscription is apparently considered “essential” to enabling planning for war without limits. And even during the “shutdown”, Congress has taken time out of its budget debates to act on legislation to plan and prepare for war. But major proposed changes to Selective Service laws, regulations, and procedures remain undecided.

 By the end of this year, we could see the most significant changes in Selective Service law, regulations, and procedures since 1980. Or pending decisions might be postponed, continuing the current decades-old stalemate between massive noncompliance with the registration and address reporting requirements and Congressional reluctance to admit the failure of the program and repeal the Military Selective Service Act (MSSA).

 

Here’s what’s in the works:

 

(1) Changes in Selective Service law

 A dangerous and unworkable proposal to have the SSS attempt to register all potential draftees “automatically” using other Federal databases was approved by the full House of Representatives as part of this year’s annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This year’s NDAA still

has its traditional “Defense” title. But we can’t help wondering whether, if Congress renames the “Department of Defense” the “Department of War”, as President Trump has proposed, next year’s version of this bill will be titled the “War Authorization Act”.

 The proposal for “automatic” draft registration in the House version of the NDAA would give the SSS unprecedented authority to obtain and aggregate any information from any other Federal agency or from potential draftees that the SSS believes might help the agency identify or locate potential draftees. Because whether an individual is required to register, under the current interpretation of the MSSA by the SSS, depends on both sex as assigned at birth and immigration and visa status, the SSS would be

authorized and required to collect information held by other Federal agencies for other purposes and interrogate young people to try to create a master database of every young adult in the USA including their sex as assigned at birth, their immigration and visa status, and their current address.

 *Activists for peace and freedom need to sound the alarm now:* The power to collect and aggregate personal information from any and all other Federal agencies that would be given to the SSS by the proposal for automatic draft registration would be unprecedented for any Federal agency, and would have unprecedented potential for weaponization and abuse, especially against immigrant and transgender young adults. Members of Congress should care about, and should oppose, this proposal, even if they aren’t worried about a military draft.

 The Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already gained access to the SSS registration database. There’s no telling what damage DOGE would do with the additional data the SSS would be authorized and required to compile in order to try to register potential draftees “automatically”.

 The House version of the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2026 including the provision for “automatic” Selective Service registration was approved by the full House on 10 September 2025 and finally forwarded to the Senate, after clerical corrections, on 30 September 2025, just before the Federal government partially shut down. A bipartisan amendment to replace the provision for “automatic” draft registration with a provision to repeal the MSSA was introduced in the House, but the House Rules Committee chose not to allow a floor vote on this amendment.

 No comparable proposal for automatic registration or expansion of SSS data-gathering authority is included in the version of this year’s NDAA approved by the Senate on 9 October 2025. The fate of the House provision for “automatic” Selective Service registration will be decided during closed-door House-Senate conference negotiations on the NDAA, the outcome of which probably won’t be known until much later in the year.

 Proposals adopted by the House and/or the Senate to expand Selective service to young women as well as young men were removed from the NDAA in conferences in 2016, 2021, 2022, and 2024, along with the proposal for “automatic” registration in 2024. But that’s no guarantee of what will happen this year. Stay tuned.

 

(2) Changes in Selective Service regulations

 During the Biden Administration, the SSS conducted its first comprehensive review in decades of the regulations spelling out its contingency plans for a draft, if Congress were to authorize a draft without at the same time making any other changes to the MSSA. The SSS planned to publish a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for its revised regulations in early 2025. But this update to SSS regulations has been held back indefinitely by President Trump’s ongoing freeze on promulgation of new Federal regulations. Little is known concerning the content of the planned revisions to the regulations.

 

(3) Changes to draft boards

 Lists of draft board members and draft board jurisdictions by county released in February and March of 2025 in response to one of my Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests revealed that many local and appeal boards lack a quorum and/or lack a member from each county over which they have

jurisdiction. As a result, they would lack authority to adjudicate claims for deferment, exemption, or classification and assignment to noncombatant or alternative service as a conscientious objector in the event of a draft.

 Within weeks after I reported on the implications of these draft board vacancies for SSS (un)readiness to actually carry out an on-demand draft, the SSS quietly replaced the application for draft board membership on its Web site with a statement that, “The Selective Service System is currently reviewing the structure and operations of the Board Member Program. As part of this reassessment, we are temporarily pausing the acceptance of new volunteer applications.”

 No further information has been released concerning the reasons for the “pause” or what the SSS plans to do about draft board vacancies. The mandate for appointment of draft boards and the entitlement of draftees to have claims heard by local boards and to appeal administrative denials to state and national appeal boards remain part of the MSSA and the SSS regulations, so the SSS couldn’t carry out a draft without filling these vacancies. Current board members continue to serve until their terms expire or they resign or die, but the number of boards that lack a quorum and would be unable to function in the event of a draft will grow with attrition as long as no new board members are being appointed.

 It’s unclear whether decisions will be made this year on any of these issues or if these proposals will merely be carried over to, or reintroduced, next year. But these issues won’t go away until Congress acts, and Congress won’t act unless and until it feels public pressure, whether from lobbying or from direct action such as continued passive but massive noncompliance with the draft registration law.

 There’s growing recognition that current SSS contingency plans for a draft, especially the registration program, are a paper tiger that won’t stand up to even cursory critical scrutiny. Sooner or later, something has to change. The direction of that change depends on what we do now and in the months and perhaps years ahead to organize and resist ongoing planning and preparation for military conscription that makes larger wars and military adventurism more likely.

 

 

Edward Hasbrouck is the editor and publisher of Resisters.info, the most comprehensive non-governmental source of information about the draft, draft registration, and draft resistance in the U.S. since 1980. In the 1980s, he worked as an organizer with the National Resistance Committee and as co-editor of Resistance News, the national journal of draft resistance. As one of only 20 vocal nonregistrants prosecuted in the 1980s before the government abandoned enforcement of draft registration, he was convicted of willful refusal to present himself for and submit to registration with the Selective Service System, and served four and a half months in a Federal Prison Camp in 1983-1984. In 2019, he was the only draft resister invited to testify before the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service at its hearings on the future of Selective Service. A connection to Iowa:  he was part of a panel on resistance to the draft at the 2023 national conference of the Peace and Justice Studies Association at Iowa State University.