Transcript

Announcer: 

Welcome to Budget Watchdog All Federal, the podcast dedicated to making sense of the budget spending and tax issues facing the nation. Cut through the partisan rhetoric and talking points for the facts about what’s being talked about, bandied about and pushed to Washington, brought to you by taxpayers for common sense. And now the host of Budget Watchdog AF TCS President Steve Ellis.

Steve Ellis:

Welcome to All American Taxpayers Seeking Common Sense. You’ve made it to the right place for 30 years. TCS that’s taxpayers for common sense, has served as an independent nonpartisan budget watchdog group based in Washington dc We believe in fiscal policy for America that is based on facts. We believe in transparency and accountability because no matter where you are in the political spectrum, no one wants to see their tax dollars wasted. It’s July, 2025 and Dear podcast listeners, as the Senate and House prepare to mark up the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, the Pentagon’s annual must Pass Policy bill. One common Sense proposal is finally getting the momentum it deserves. In op-ed last month, senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Tim Sheehy of Montana announced their plans to introduce the Warrior’s right to Repair Act legislation to ensure that service members have the tools and data they need to repair their own equipment. And with the NDA markup right around the corner, we’ll expect they’ll try to attach the Bill’s language as an amendment to that bill here to shed some light on. This is a special guest, Dylan Hedler cadet, acting Vice President of Policy and Government Affairs at the Project on Government oversight and Gabe Murphy, TCS policy analyst and author of a recent op-ed and Stars and Stripes supporting this effort. Dylan, welcome to the show, and Gabe, welcome back.

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette:

Thank you Steve. Great to be here.

Great to be back, Steve.

Steve Ellis:

So Dylan, let’s start with you and the basics, what does the right to repair mean in general and in a military context?

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette:

Sure. Great question. So generally speaking, this just means that everybody theoretically should have the right to repair, to fix, to do whatever they want to do with something, a product that they paid their own hard-earned money for. So in the military context, what this means is that anything that the Department of Defense buys from private sector defense contractor, they should also have the right to repair those things.

Steve Ellis:

Dylan, it’s kind of astounding to me that this problem exists in the first place. Are there examples of not having this right to repair delaying critical repairs?

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette:

Absolutely, yeah. Your listeners may have heard of the opt-in troubled always concerning F 35 lighter jet program, and this is poster child where all that is wrong with acquisition and procurement when it comes to the Department of Defense. But in particular, the F 35 has experienced some significant problems around operation and sustainment, which is just the fancy way of saying how does it keep the jet flying and how is it able to repair and maintain those jets? And a lot of that has been traced back to per GAO reports has been traced back to the fact that the Department of Defense does not own all of the technical data, all the intellectual property, all of the tools, the repair manuals, all the stuff it needs to adequately and sufficiently and in a timely manner repair and maintain the F 35

Steve Ellis:

Budget faithful just as a reminder to the GAO, the Government Accountability Office, the independent investigative arm of Congress that works and looks at a lot of these issues and is a key resource for both POGO and taxpayers for common sense. Now, Gabe, bringing you in here on this, have you heard of other examples?

Gabe Murphy:

I have indeed, Steve. I mean, some of ’em are particularly egregious. For instance, a now retired Army officer, master Sergeant Wesley Reed was stationed in Afghanistan and he couldn’t repair a CT scanner that he’d been using to search for internal bleeding and injured troops. I mean, it’s insane. This wasn’t an isolated incident either. Another army officer reported that MRI machines as well as CT scanners that they used required service keys to access essential repair and diagnostic functions. And when those keys expired, which they often do and regularly do, it could take days or even longer to get the keys from the contractors and restore access.

Steve Ellis:

And you mentioned about someone being stationed in Afghanistan. I mean, in some of these cases, they’ve actually had to fly contractors out to actually do the repairs, right? Or tow a Navy ship into port because it had broken down at sea and then actually have the people come out to fix them, right?

Gabe Murphy:

Yeah. I mean, the Navy has been forced to fly contractors out to sea to repair vital equipment. It’s also delayed trainings for Marines in South Korea who weren’t allowed to fix a broken generator, something as simple as that. So it really has impacted all of the services in a variety of ways.

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette:

Yeah, we’ve seen this come down to things that’s critical as the handle on a vehicle, right? Obviously our enlisted troops, our service members are highly capable, highly skilled, highly trained people, but they’re prevented from doing things as basic as repairing the handle on a vehicles so that that vehicle can be used. We’ve seen examples like this time and time again, Gabe just listed some of them, and this doesn’t pass the sniff test from a common sense standpoint, but this has real negative effects on readiness. If you are a war fighter out there kind of in theater somewhere, and you have to sit around and wait because some kind of critical or vital equipment that you rely on to keep you alive and keep you safe is broken and you’re not allowed to fix it. So I don’t think it requires a lot of intellect to understand why that’s a problem from a readiness standpoint. And that’s not even talking about the taxpayer standpoint and the cost effectiveness standpoint.

Steve Ellis:

Right? And we’re going to get to that here in a moment. But certainly part of it is, is that if service members don’t know how to repair or don’t have the training to repair their equipment in a peacetime environment, then in a wartime environment, they’re not going to be able to do it as well. And I can tell you, and you may not know this, Dylan, but before I got in this line of work, I was an officer in the Coast Guard and my first assignment out of the Coast Guard Academy was on the Coast Guard Cutter Sol, and I was on board for the 50th anniversary of its commissioning. It was commissioned in 1943. And believe me, if we didn’t have the right to repair on that ship, we would basically be building Sorel there on the dock there, the Lima dock there on Governor’s Island.

Okay. At least in some cases, it’s a life and death issue for soldiers in the field and a national security issue because when equipment breaks down that can impact military missions. And we know that waiting for a contractor to get flown out to sea is a problem and is not going to be a very viable solution. But what about the cost side? Pogo did some digging I know a while back and found that military service members and the Pentagon civilian employees cost a lot less than private contractors to perform the same job. Does that apply to these repairs as well?

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette:

That absolutely does apply. Yeah. Yes. We put out a big report quite a while ago, over a decade ago called Bad Business. And what we were trying to do was basically kick the tires on the theory. We hear a lot that, well, if you outsource and you privatize things, it’s always going to be cheaper. It’s always going to be more efficient, right? Sometimes it is. Oftentimes it isn’t though. And when we’re talking about here trying to compare what it costs to pay private contractors to do something as opposed to insourcing it to already existing civilian workers in the federal workforce or in this case service members, it’s actually much more expensive to outsource that kind of thing. And so we’re not achieving any cost gains or efficiency gains by having contractors be in charge of performing these maintenance and repairs. We’re in fact paying two or three times more than we would be otherwise if we just trained our military service members on how to do these repairs. And by our review of the data, we’re spending upwards of 50 billion on contracts that are under the umbrella of operation and maintenance, which is where all of this would be housed. And so if we were to give DOD the right to repair and have them actually train people on how to do this work in house, we could be saving tens of billions of dollars if we were to estimate that on the conservative side of an estimate.

Steve Ellis:

And it’s always a tricky thing comparing the contractors, which obviously have a profit motive or have to build in a profit to stay in business, but then also with the service members and civilians, there’s benefits and pensions and things along those lines. So it’s a calculation that you have to make. But one other thing that I think kind of gets overlooked too is that this is providing critical training for our service members and that not just their training for when they’re in the service, but then also these critical skills that they can actually take out to the private sector whenever they decide to actually leave service. Not a job training program, but like a vocational school training and things that can help them get employment after they leave service.

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette:

Absolutely. We have a lot of mechanics and technicians and maintenance professionals already in the military who are extraordinarily skilled, extraordinarily competent. They can’t do this work, it’s just that they’re straight up prevented from doing this work because of these onerous contractual restrictions on it.

Steve Ellis:

So Gabe, turning back to you, what would the Warrior Right to Repair ACT do to address this problem?

Gabe Murphy:

Well, Steve, the bill would require Pentagon contractors to provide the military with reasonable access to the tools and the technical data that they need to repair equipment. Some of the requirements get pretty technical to ensure that the military really gets all of the information and tools that it needs, but a lot of it is simply about oversight to ensure that the Pentagon is following through with these requirements when they actually sign new contracts. I think on a practical level, the impact of this will be that service members no longer need to wait weeks or even months sometimes to get equipment fixed because they’ll have the tools and the data and the training to fix themselves in the moment.

Steve Ellis:

And as I understand it, this effort is really picking up steam now, right, Gabe? It’s not just Centers Warn and she, but it’s actually gaining some momentum.

Gabe Murphy:

Yeah, it certainly is. The administration, for example, has thrown its hat in the ring here. The Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll at Defense Secretary Hezes instruction implemented this already for the Army. So there’s some support from the White House on this. And this legislation though would go farther by securing these rights for all of the services and by writing it into law so that some future administration doesn’t just change course. On top of that, in a recent hearing representative Marie Gamp Perez who introduced a similar bill in the house last year, she asked House Armed Services Committee chair Mike Rogers about it during a committee hearing, and he said he fully supports the right to repair legislation and is hopeful that it will be done this year. I think it’s really rare to see this kind of bipartisan support on specific proposals to Reign and Pentagon waste, and I think it’s reflective of just how common sense this legislation is.

Steve Ellis:

Well, certainly after the last few partisan weeks we’ve had, having some bipartisan momentum is a breath of fresh air. And to your point, Gabe, I mean the only way you achieve durable reform is you put it into law. You can’t trust that one administration’s going to implement what the last administration did. And just like you said, just because the Army’s doing it doesn’t mean it’s the Air Force or the Navy doing it. And so you need to get that into law and then hold them account because the contractors are coming, which makes me come back to, are there any arguments against this legislation?

Gabe Murphy:

Well, Steve, there really aren’t many. I mean, as you can imagine, Pentagon contractors who stand to lose out on their monopoly price sustainment contracts aren’t thrilled about this. They sent a letter last year arguing that the bill would discourage companies from selling their products to the Department of Defense. I think that’s a hard sell for anyone who doesn’t have a vested interest in preventing the military from repairing its own equipment. It’s not like these contractors are going to just walk away from still lucrative contracts. Just to make a point.

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette:

A lot of these companies exist or the exclusive purpose of selling things and engaging in contracts with the Pentagon, it’s frankly laughable that all of a sudden the defense industry is going to evaporate if they have to enter into fair and contracts with the Department of Defense. There’s basically one buyer in this industry and not the Department of Defense,

Steve Ellis:

And they’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars. So I certainly think that there’s still some profit incentive, it just may not be feathering their nest quite as much. So Dylan, continuing with you, for those of us without a vested interest in getting those hundreds of billions of dollars, there’s some recent polling out there on this as well. What did the American people think of Right to repair?

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette:

Yeah, we recently gotten some really strong polling from our friends at the Public Interest Research Group, perg, who poll the Americans across the ideological and partisan spectrum. And by overwhelming high super majority bipartisan rates, you’re talking about Democrats, independents, and Republicans, all above 65, 70% all support getting the military the right to repair. So we’ve been talking about this quite a bit so far, but the through line here is that this is such a common sense sort of practical, pragmatic thing to do, and the American people absolutely agree. Broadly speaking,

Gabe Murphy:

74% of the American public supports this legislation, including 53% who strongly support it, and that’s bipartisan support. We’re talking about 62% of independents, 73% of Democrats, and 78% of Republicans. You don’t see that very often.

Steve Ellis:

No, you don’t. And so the majority of Americans, the vast majority of Americans are clearly on board. Is this something people know about from a right to repair challenges in other fields, or is it just that when presented with such a clear problem, people want to see a solution, Dylan?

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette:

Yeah, I think generally speaking, the right to repair across all kind of specific areas does enjoy pretty broad based support because at the end of the day, this comes down to a pretty visceral principle. If you paid your money to buy something, then it is yours. This is basic like American sort of values, 1 0 1 property rights, you’ve bought something, it’s yours. You should kind of be able to do whatever you want to with it. And so when we’re talking about the military here, we have to remember, and I know I don’t need to tell you all at TCS this, but everything that the military buys is paid for by taxpayer dollars, which means that traditional arguments around who owns what in this context always have to be brought back to the fact that it is we who paid for it because of the tax dollars taken out of our hard earned paychecks every week. That’s what is being used to buy these huge weapons systems. And so we have a vested interest, we have a right to want to know that those dollars are being spent wisely and efficiently. And to that end, we want to make sure that we broadly speaking in the public, have the right to repair those things. And so that’s why you do see such strong support across the ideological partisan political spectrum, be it right to repair in the military context or right to repair in the private sector consumer context.

Gabe Murphy:

Right? And I mean, in the private sector, we’ve seen progress made on this issue. I mean, McDonald’s earned the right to repair its own ice cream machines after a prolonged battle over that. I believe Apple recently allowed various repair shops to do some repairs outside of the genius spar. So I think fact that the military doesn’t have this yet is astounding and really needs to change, and this legislation would do that.

Steve Ellis:

So Dylan, there’s this term optionality that’s being thrown about in far as contracts and some of these issues. What does that mean and how does that benefit the Pentagon?

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette:

Yeah, Steve, that’s a great question. So to take this out of the DC Business School speak optionality just means you’ve got choices that you can make. And so here, if the Department of Defense were to have the right to repair, there would be some rare instances where it actually makes sense from a sort of a readiness standpoint or from a cost-effectiveness standpoint to have a contract that you put out there. You try to solicit bids on it just to do sustainment and repair on a weapon system depending on the situation. Right Now, ordinarily you want your first option to be you in-house it to service members, right? For all the reasons we’ve already talked about. But there are going to be some stances where it still makes end to have a contractor performing repair and sustainment and maintenance work. But currently, because it’s only the major prime defense contractors who have the right to repair because they reserve it to themselves in the original contracts, we don’t have that optionality with the Department of Defense.

But if we did, sometimes the Department of Defense would be able to award out these contracts to smaller, more agile, more innovative companies who are currently basically locked out of the defense contracting world because it’s just the primes who are able to do this. But you would be able to have real competition when it comes to awarding contracts out or sustainment and repair, and that would have a couple of effects that could be really helpful. Competition drives prices down, we know that. But also it would expand all of the participants in the defense industrial base, which we also know is a huge North Star goal that we keep hearing about in the context of defense spending, of trying to reform the defense acquisition process, all that stuff. We keep hearing about the defense industrial base being too small, being too concentrated, and being too sluggish. Here’s a way to expand that base, to revitalize it and to realize some cost savings that are going to help bring overall spending down and really help the taxpayer

Steve Ellis:

Imagine that competition driving down costs, whoever heard it, whoever thought of such a thing. Alright, Dylan Hedler cadet Gabe Murphy, thank you for joining me on the Budget Watchdog All Federal podcast.

Gabe Murphy:

Thank you, Steve. Thanks Steve. See you next time.

Steve Ellis:

Dare you have it podcast listeners. The Pentagon isn’t really any different than you wanting to be able to fix your car or your lawnmower and being frustrated that you can’t get the parts and you can’t get the technology when it comes to lowering taxpayer costs, while strengthening National Security warriors right to repair this is common sense as it gets. This is the frequency. Mark it on your dial, subscribe and share and know this taxpayers for common sense has your back America. We read the bills, monitor the earmarks, and highlight those wasteful programs that poorly spend our money and ship long-term risk to taxpayers. We’ll be back with a new episode soon. I hope you’ll meet us right here to learn.