House Rules Committee Blocks Vote
on Ending Selective Service
Edward Hasbrouck / Antiwar.com

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2025/09/09/house-rules-committee-blocks-vote-on-ending-selective-service/

(September 9, 2025) — The House of Representatives won’t get to vote on the latest proposal to finally end Selective Service.

Early Tuesday morning, after overnight behind-the-scenes discussions, the House Rules Committee voted to propose a rule for House floor consideration of this year’s National Defense [sic] Authorization Act (NDAA) that leaves the proposal for attempted automatic registration of young men for a possible military draft in the version of the NDAA to be debated and voted on by the full House, and prevents any debate or vote on the “automatic” registration proposal or the alternate proposal to end draft registration.

The House Rules Committee recommended “making in order” for House floor debate and vote almost 300 amendments to the NDAA, but not the bipartisan amendment to replace the provision to try to automate draft registration with a provision to repeal the Military Selective Service Act, end draft registration, and abolish the Selective Service System. (Scroll down here for the list of amendments submitted to the Rules Committee and those made in order for floor debate and votes.) There was no public discussion by the Rules Committee of any of the proposals with respect to Selective Service.

The upshot of this avoidance of the issue of the draft by the Rules Committee is that the House will probably approve a version of this year’s NDAA including automatic draft registration, while the Senate version will make no major change to the Selective Service law. The issue will then be among the differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill referred to a closed-door House-Senate conference committee to negotiate a package-deal set of compromises.

There’s a good chance that, as happened in 2016, 2021, 2022, and 2024, the changes to Selective Service proposed by the House and/or the Senate will be removed from the final compromise version of the bill by the conference committee. But there’s no guarantee that will happen, and even if it does, that will only postpone the issue for Congress of how to deal with the ongoing failure of draft registration and the likely failure of any attempt to activate a draft.

There’s been a stalemate on the draft, and an unwillingness in Congress to face the issue, for decades. Draft registration has failed, but neither Congress, the Pentagon, Presidents from either party, nor of course the staff of the Selective Service System — whose jobs are on the line — have been willing to accept reality, admit failure, or acknowledge the policy implications of removing the draft from the U.S. arsenal of mechanisms to enable unlimited “forever” wars around the world.

The proposal for automatic draft registration is the last hope of Selective Service System staff to salvage their agency and their civil service sinecures from being abolished — perhaps on recommendation of the Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — as a failure and a waste of money. The proposal for automatic draft registration is likely to be revived every year by friends of Selective Service and preparedness for a draft, unless and until Congress ends the Selective Service charade and recognize that a draft isn’t a feasible option, even as a “fallback”.

Opponents of conscription and war need to remain alert to the threat of an attempt to automate draft registration (which might be left in this year’s NDAA by the conference committee), and keep the pressure on Congress, regardless of what happens with this year’s NDAA, to face the facts and repeal Selective Service.

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.