Annual ‘Defense’ Bill Leaves Selective Service in Limbo

On Friday, 22 December 2023, President Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the Federal government’s 2024 fiscal year into law.

The signing of the annual NDAA has often been an occasion for pomp and publicity, but this year it was done with no public ceremony and the tersest possible statement from the White House, on a date chosen to minimize news coverage and public notice.

Notably, this year’s NDAA as enacted makes no mention whatsoever of the Selective Service System.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that funding for Selective Service has been cut: Despite the fact that the sole function of the Selective Service System is to plan and be prepared to start drafting people into the military whenever Congress and the President so order, the SSS is a nominally civilian agency funded separately from the “defense” budget.

What the silence of the NDAA on the subject of Selective Service does mean is that the future of the draft and draft registration remains in limbo.

In recent years, Congress has considered both amendments to the NDAA and free-standing bills that would have expanded draft registration to young women as well as young men or, alternatively, would have repealed the Military Selective Service Act, abolished the SSS, and ended draft registration.

In 2016, 2021, and again in 2022, Congress came close to expanding draft registration to women. In each of those years, at least one house of Congress included a provision to expand draft registration to women in its version of the annual NDAA, but that provision was removed in the final stages of closed-door House-Senate conference negotiations.

This year, neither expansion nor repeal of Selective Service was seriously considered, and no provisions related to Selective Service made it into either the House or the Senate version of the NDAA or the final conference compromise enacted and signed into law.

That means men (as determined at birth) are still supposed to register with the Selective Service System within a month of their 18th birthday, and report to the SSS each time they change their mailing address until their 26th birthday.

Few young men comply with this law, of course, but as long as the law remains on the books and the Selective Service keeps up a facade of “readiness” to start a draft on demand, war planners can pretend that conscription is available as a “fallback” if recruiting falls short. With a draft in their back pocket, they don’t have to consider whether enough people will volunteer to fight larger, longer wars in more places around the world. The existence of draft registration, contingency planning for a draft, and perceived availability of an on-demand draft are critical enablers of planning for war without limits. With war clouds on the horizon, ending draft registration remains as important as ever.

Proposals to expand draft registration to young women aren’t going to go away until Congress decides either to expand draft registration to women or to end it entirely.

A proposal to end draft registration was introduced in the House this year, but despite a confusingly similar title it was a much weaker bill with much less support than the Selective Service Repeal Act that was introduced with bipartisan support in both the House and Senate in 2019 and again in 2021.

The key difference between the earlier bipartisan House-Senate bill and the latest House bill is that the earlier bill included provisions to end all sanctions against those who never registered with the SSS. The more recent, narrower bill would end draft registration but would allow both Federal and state governments to continue to impose lifetime administrative sanctions, such as ineligibility for government jobs, on those who didn’t register while registration was in effect. As I pointed out in a meeting with the National Commisission on Military, National, and Public Service in 2019, if Congress wants to put draft registration behind it, it needs to put an end to all of the Federal and state penalties for past nonregistration.

This makes it critical for opponents of the draft to get a member of the U.S. House or Senate to reintroduce the 2019/2021 Selective Service Repeal Act in the current Congress, and get commitments from Congressional candidates to sponsor and push for a vote on this bill.

Meanwhile, as a result of legislation which was enacted three years ago but which provided for delayed implementation, all of the questions about Selective Service registration were removed from the FAFSA Federal student financial aid form starting with the current 2023-2024 school year. It’s important to get out the word that the law has changed and young men no longer have to register for the draft in order to be eligible for Federal student aid, although draft registration is still a condition of eligibility for state financial aid and/or admission to state colleges and universities in some states. See this new explainer on my site on Selective Service and student aid for more details and advice.

The de-linking of draft registration and Federal student aid is further reducing the already low rate of compliance with the registration law. Even the SSS, which counts as “in compliance” anyone who ever registers at any address, regardless of whether they have a current address on file at which they could be served with an induction order, admits that compliance is likely to fall even further now that the questions about draft registration have been removed from the FAFSA form:

The CY 2022 national registration rate for men aged 18 to 25 was 84 percent. This was a five percent decrease from CY 2021, largely driven by the loss of the requirement for a man to register with SSS to receive Federal student aid and the removal of the option to registration [sic] on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form, which are both outcomes of the passage of the FAFSA Simplification Act in 2020. Since this method of registration historically accounted for up to 20 percent of all annual registrations, SSS expects the national registration rate to further decrease.

[Selective Service System, Annual Report to Congress for Calendar Year 2022]

Compliance rates officially reported by the SSS have fallen to 75% in California, 68% in Orogon, 58% in Masschusetts, and 50% in the District of Columbia.

With draft registration no longer required for Federal student aid, compliance depends almost entirely on laws in some states that automatically register applicants for drivers licenses with Selective Service. The highest current priority for the SSS is to get laws like this passed in states where draft registration isn’t linked to drivers licenses, including California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Oregon. A high priority for opponents of the draft should be to oppose these proposals and to lobby legislators in other states to remove the linkages to Selective Service registration in their drivers license laws.

The current stalemate on the draft in Congress is nothing new. The 43 years (and counting) since 1980 of draft registration in the USA, and of resistance to it, are a substantial fraction of the long history of the draft and draft resistance in the USA. Yet the history of the draft, draft registration, and draft resistance since 1980 is often omitted from what are misrepresented as “comprehensive” histories of conscription in the USA, either because this period is “too recent” or because “there is no draft”. Neither of these, however, is a valid argument for historical blindness or amnesia.

As the South African philosopher of social organization and social change Rick Turner observed in his treatise on participatory democracy, The Eye of the Needle, “History is not something that has just come to an end and is certainly not something that came to an end fifty years ago.”

The history of planning and preparation for a draft, and of resistance to it, when induction orders are not being issued, is as much a part of the history of the draft as the history of planning and preparation for nuclear war, and of resistance to it, during times when orders to launch a nuclear attack have not been issued, are a part of the history of nuclear warfare and of anti-nuclear activism. But draft registration, like nuclear warheads that have been deployed but not yet exploded, remains an element of ongoing war preparations that is too often both out of sight and out of mind.

I’m an activist, not a historian, but I’ve been doing what I can to preserve that history for whatever value it may have to future generations of draft resisters, whatever their reasons for resistance and whatever choices they make.

I’ve recently acquired a second-hand high-speed scanner, which has enabled me to start posting more lengthy documents from my personal archives including trial transcripts, court pleadings, FBI files, public statements, posters, and photos from some of the “show-trial” prosecutions of draft registration resisters in the 1980s. These include extensive materials about my own prosecution, but perhaps the most historically significant and revealing collection I’ve posted relates to the case of the Boston 18, who were arrested at a sit-in inside the main Post Office and draft registration site (which was also, coincidentally, the Federal courthouse) in downtown Boston during the mass registration week in January 1981 for men born in 1962.

The Boston 18 eventually spent thirty days each in Federal prisons — an unusually harsh sentence for a simple sit-in.

Expert witnesses at the trial of the Boston 18 included Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and the feminist scholar-activists Karen Lindsey (one of the principal spokespeople for the Women Opposed to Registration and the Draft) and Linda Gordon. But what I think is most interesting about the records of the case is the testimony of the defendants themselves. It provides a rare, possibly unique, look into the character and politics of the diverse community of allies who supported the young men who were being ordered to sign their lives over to the government and the military. Draft resistance was never limited to men of draft age.

In addition to historical material, I’ve added more advice and resources for young people who don’t want to be drafted, more information about the diversity of reasons to resist draft registration, and an improved sitemap and outline that I hope will make my site easier to explore. Some URLs have changed, but I’ve tried to redirect all the old URLs to the new pages. Please let me know if you come across broken links or navigation problems.

I’ve got more boxes in my basement to deal with, including more files about draft resistance organizing and activism that the FBI and the Bureau of Prisons released in response to my FOIA requests. If you have documents, photos, etc. about draft resistance since 1980 that you’d like scanned or think belong on my Web site or with the collection I’ve deposited and am continuing to add to in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, please get in touch.

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.