Despite its popularity and broad bipartisan support, right-to-repair provisions that would have given service members the ability to fix their own equipment in the field were stripped from the compromise version of the 2026 defense policy bill after industry pushback. 

The House’s Data-as-a-Service Solutions for Weapon System Contracts provision, which would have required DoD to negotiate access to technical data and necessary software before signing a contract, was removed from the final text of the annual legislation released over the weekend. The Senate’s provision requiring contractors to provide the military with detailed repair and maintenance instructions was dropped from the bill as well.

Instead, the legislation requires the Defense Department to develop a digital system that would track and manage all technical data and verify whether contractors and subcontractors comply with contract requirements related to technical data. The compromise version of the bill also requires DoD to review all existing contracts to determine what contractors were required to deliver and what data DoD can access. 

“It’s almost completely meaningless relative to ‘right to repair.’ It only addresses cases in which the contractors have failed to deliver or make available the data that is already in their contracts. It doesn’t address in any way whether the contracts themselves are sufficient to support service members’ right to repair,” Greg Williams, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight, told Federal News Network.

While this is not the first time Congress has stripped right-to-repair language from the National Defense Authorization Act, the 2026 defense policy bill is likely the most high-profile attempt to block the reform — this year, the proposal had gained momentum and wide support from the Trump administration, the House and Senate, and senior DoD leaders.  

But defense lobbyists pushed back against the reform during the conference process. The National Defense Industrial Association, for example, said these bipartisan efforts would “hamper innovation and DoD’s access to cutting-edge technologies by deterring companies from contracting with the DoD.” 

Eric Fanning, former secretary of the Army and CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, said the right to repair provisions would “cripple the very innovation on which our warfighters rely.”

“Given that we had support in the House and the Senate on a bipartisan basis, and we had the support of the Trump administration and the secretary of Defense, I don’t know how to interpret this, other than to say that industry prevailed in their influence over Congress, and the NDAA now reflects the interests of the business community instead of the American taxpayers and service members,” Williams said.

For years, the military has struggled with contract-imposed restrictions on repairing and maintaining its own equipment and weapons, forcing it to rely on original manufacturers to conduct necessary fixes in the field, which is costly and time-consuming. 

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, for example, has become an outspoken critic of large defense companies — he previously said that defense contractors have “conned the American people and the Pentagon and the Army.” Driscoll recently highlighted a Lockheed Martin Black Hawk helicopter part that costs the Army $47,000 to replace because the manufacturer refuses to fix a control knob the Army could make for $15.

 Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mt.) said in a statement they “support the Pentagon using the full extent of its existing authorities to insist on right to repair protections when it purchases equipment from contractors.” 

Williams said while this is the chance for the Pentagon to exercise its existing authorities, without legislation that enforces consistency, it’s very unlikely that contracting officers will be able to effectively implement right to repair across thousands of contracts. 

“I don’t want to let the Pentagon off the hook either. I believe that if Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made this a high priority, he could ensure that we acquire adequate data. But he would have to make sure that every contract officer on every contract was way more diligent than they have been up to this point,” Williams said.

For now, the right-to-repair effort is likely stalled until next year. Lawmakers will vote on the NDAA one more time before it is sent to President Donald Trump for his signature.  

“We will keep fighting for a common-sense, bipartisan law to address this unnecessary problem,” Warren and Sheehy said.

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A compromise version of the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, released late Sunday, includes several key civilian personnel reforms that could change how the Defense Department hires and manages its civilian workforce.

Most notably, the draft text includes a provision that would allow the Defense Department to promote employees based on skills and qualifications without requiring them to satisfy minimum time-in-grade requirements before being eligible for promotion.

Ron Sanders, a former career human capital leader in government, said the provision is emblematic of the long-running debate to allow DoD to secede from the rest of the federal civil service due to the nature of its mission.

“It is a big deal, and it underscores a bigger issue … You should be able to promote people, regardless of time served, if they can do the job — promote them,” Ron Sanders, a former career human capital leader in government, told Federal News Network. “There have been numerous attempts to carve out more flexibilities for the DoD civilian workforce than the rest of the civil service had.”

“I’m of the mind, and I’m not alone in this, that the federal civil service should be broken up. It should be glued together by a series of standards and principles — there are some cross cutting government-wide principles that should always remain in effect. But DoD has a different mission than the intel community, and it has a different mission than FBI and the law enforcement and other aspects of Homeland Security. Trying to treat all of that as one-size-fits-all is problematic. And I think you’re seeing a continuation of the debate that DoD is different,” he added. 

The time-in-grade requirement is antiquated anyway, Sanders argued, and should be revisited for the rest of the federal civil service.

The bill would also allow the Defense Department to use skill-based assessments to determine whether applicants are qualified for open positions.

“If you sum it all up, DoD would basically have its own civilian personnel system, separate and apart from the rest of the federal civil service. I think we’ve gone to the other extreme, and we’ve been living there for decades now, and that is a one-size-fits-all mentality. What’s good for the SEC is good for DoD, and that’s just not true anymore,” Sanders said. 

In addition, if enacted into law, DoD would be able to share certificates of top candidates for various roles across the department. Certificates would remain valid for at least a year, and they are subject to agency-specific qualification checks.

This particular provision is not new, Sanders said. “If you have the applicant’s permission, sharing certificates, to me, is not a big deal, and it should have been done years and years and years ago, if it hasn’t been.”

Congress is also tightening the department’s ability to make workforce cuts by adding new analysis requirements, reporting mandates and restrictions on conducting reductions-in-force.

If passed, the bill would prohibit DoD from reducing its workforce levels or realigning functions if such changes involve more than 50 employees and occur outside the normal programming process, including ad hoc, immediate or unprogrammed workforce changes. The Defense secretary is also required to notify Congress about planned workforce reductions.

“I think it is part of a larger trend, and that is a growing realization that civilian personnel in DoD are important and they should be managed. If something affects 50 or more employees or some small number like that, that’s micromanaging,” Sanders said. “I don’t think that was in intent on the part of Congress to actually worry about 50 employees. I think it was just a failure to fully comprehend the full scope of the DoD civilian workforce, which is just plain huge.”

Lawmakers are also seeking to centralize and elevate civilian personnel management within each military service by placing it under senior uniformed leaders. If the measure passes, senior leaders who manage military manpower would also oversee the department’s civilian workforce.

“I think at least part of the reasoning is the necessity of having what I would argue are redundant staffs at the military department headquarters and at the major command level. There’s a pendulum here, and it goes back and forth. But at the end of the day, somebody really does need to take a hard look at the staffs that have emerged and decide whether they’re redundant and whether they could be centralized,” Sanders said. 

Cyber workforce

The legislation also expands which positions DoD can hire using special cyber authorities, as well as significantly increases the maximum pay DoD can offer for cyber talent.

Under current law, Cyber Excepted Services hiring authorities apply to U.S. Cyber Command, as well as certain cybersecurity and IT operations roles across the services. The 2026 defense policy bill could expand it to positions held in combatant commands, defense agencies, and field activities supporting CYBERCOM. DoD would also expand Cyber Excepted Services to 500 more cyber roles that don’t neatly fit into existing categories but are still vital and hard-to-fill jobs

The legislation would also give the defense secretary greater pay flexibility for cyber talent, allowing DoD to offer up to 150% of the maximum basic pay authorized for Executive Schedule Level I roles.

“Neither Homeland Security nor DoD has taken full advantage of the authorities that Congress gave them literally decades ago. In DoD case, I think the mandate, and I read this as a mandate, to put more people under CES is generally a good thing. It just again underscores whether DoD should be treated differently or whether you need a separate set of personnel flexibilities for all cyber ninjas at DoD,” Sanders said. 

Worker protections stripped

Meanwhile, the American Federation of Government Employees — the nation’s largest federal employee union — is urging Congress to vote against the House rule for the 2026 defense policy bill.

AFGE says negotiators removed a bipartisan House provision that would have restored collective bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of Defense Department civilian employees. The union says removing that language means that the legislation fails to protect basic rights of workers who maintain ships, aircraft and support service members. The union is calling on lawmakers to reject the procedural rule and restore the worker protections before the NDAA moves forward.

“If lawmakers are serious about supporting our military, they must send this bill back to conference, fix it, restore these protections, and then pass an NDAA worthy of the men and women who defend this nation every day,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement.

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