Appliance and Tractor Companies Lobby Against Giving the Military the Right to Repair, which apparently you can’t do to stuff that sees combat – well done capitalsim
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.
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.
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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.
