The Military's Right to Repair Problem

Hey Kaitlyn,

What do the "Power Tool Institute," the "Institute of Makers of Explosives," the “Irrigation Association,” the “Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers” and warship manufacturers have in common? They’re all lobbying against pretty run-of-the-mill right to repair legislation that would make it easier for the military to repair the things it buys. 

-Jason

Lobbying groups across most of the device manufacturing industry—from tractor manufacturers to companies that make fridges, consumer devices, motorcycles, and medical equipment—are lobbying against legislation that would require military contractors to make it easier for the U.S. military to fix the equipment they buy, according to a document obtained by 404 Media. 

The anti-repair lobbying shows that manufacturers are still doing everything they can to retain lucrative service contracts and to kill any legislation that would threaten the repair monopolies many companies have been building for years.

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In a May hearing, Sen. Elizabeth Warren explained that “contractors often place restrictions on these deals [with the military] that prevent service members from maintaining or repairing the equipment, or even let them write a training manual without going back to the contractor.”

“These right to repair restrictions usually translate into much higher costs for DOD [Department of Defense], which has no choice but to shovel money out to big contractors whenever DOD needs to have something fixed,” she added. Warren gave the example of the Littoral combat ship, a U.S. Navy vessel that costs hundreds of millions of dollars per ship. 

“General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin consider much of the data on the ship to be proprietary, so the Navy had to delay missions and spend millions of dollars on travel costs just so that contractor-affiliated repairmen could fly in, rather than doing this ourselves,” she said.

To solve this problem, Warren and other lawmakers introduced something called Section 828 of the Defense Reauthorization Act, a must-pass bill that funds the military. Section 828 is called “Requirement for Contractors to Provide Reasonable Access to Repair Materials,” and seeks to solve an absurd situation in which the U.S. military cannot always get repair parts, tools, information, and software for everything from fighter jets to Navy battleships, because the companies want to make money by selling their customers repair contracts. 

Section 828 states: “The head of an agency may not enter into a contract for the procurement of goods or services 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.”

Manufacturers are not happy about this prospect, and are aggressively opposing it. But, interestingly, it’s not just major military contractors who build warships who are mad. Some of the groups opposing the legislation in the letter we obtained are things like the “Institute of Makers of Explosives” and the Aerospace Industries Association. But others opposing it include, for example, the Irrigation Association, whose members make irrigation equipment, the Motorcycle Industry Council, the North American Equipment Dealers Association (who represents John Deere and other tractor manufacturers), the Plumbing Manufacturers Association, AdvaMed (which represents the medical device industry), TechNet (whose members make consumer tech), various state groups like Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce and the Arizona Manufacturers Council, and dozens of others. 

A list of trade groups who signed the letter

In the letter to lawmakers, these groups and dozens of others argued that being required to sell repair parts to the military “would impose significant burdens on contractors throughout the country, including the many small and medium-sized businesses and commercial suppliers that contractors rely on to support the Department’s operational readiness and effectiveness.” 

The letter states that the companies themselves “are critical to the Department’s ability to repair and maintain its assets,” which the military Warren has said is exactly the problem: the military is often stuck relying on the original manufacturer of a product to either do the repair or send through critical repair information, which can be expensive and cumbersome. 

The letter argues that the legislation “would undermine the principle underpinning existing technical data rights statutes, which are designed to balance the government’s technical data needs against contractors’ need to protect sensitive proprietary and trade secret information.” 

This idea that device repair information cannot be provided without giving away trade secrets and proprietary data is one that manufacturers have been making for years at the state level to kill right to repair legislation for consumers. State lawmakers largely have stopped buying this argument, but anti-repair lobbyists are still trying this line of attack with Congress and the military. The letter also takes issue with the idea that there would be cost controls for the military, which Warren said are necessary to prevent “price gouging.”

The fact that groups who represent companies that have nothing to do with the military have lined up to oppose this suggests that device manufacturers more broadly are worried about a national right to repair law, and that the entire sector is trying to kill repair legislation even if it would not affect them. 

“The goal of this legislation is to ensure that the lives of our service members, and their operations, are protected from repair restrictions gumming up the works. Incredibly, most of the signers don't even make military equipment! They range from motorcycles, to farm equipment to consumer devices,” Nathan Proctor, senior director of consumer rights group US PIRG’s campaign for the right to repair, told me. “Why are appliance manufacturers against the military buying equipment they are allowed to fix? Are the profits from additional service revenue, or more frequent device replacements, more important than the safety of our military personnel?”