April 23, 2025 / Edward Hasbrouck / Edward Hasbrouck's Blog - The Selective Service System has confirmed that, as of this week, personnel from the so-called Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have arrived at the SSS and have been given access to the SSS database of men registered for a possible military draft.
Today an SSS spokesperson provided me with this official response to my questions about DOGE and SSS records:
A DOGE representative visited our Agency this week. We’ve established a great working relationship. They asked us about our data and requested access, which we gave in compliance with the President’s Executive Order on Establishing and Implementing the Department of Government Efficiency.
The SSS spokesperson also told me that no new computer matching programs involving SSS registration records have been carried out (yet) by DOGE. But it’s not clear whether the SSS would even know what DOGE has done with SSS data, once DOGE has gotten access to it and possibly exfiltrated it. DOGE and the SSS have operated computer matching programs that appear to violate the Computer Matching Act, so there’s little reason to expect that either would provide the required advance notice of new uses of SSS data.
The SSS registration database contains information on all those male U.S. citizens or residents born on or after 1 January 1960 who have registered with the SSS or have been registered by state driver’s license agencies. Compliance is low, many men in these cohorts never registered, and few of the addresses, even for draft-age men, are up to date. But the database is still huge and vulnerable to abuse.
Because SSS registration records are so inaccurate and incomplete, matching them against other databases would produce large numbers of mis-matches, with unknown consequences.
Data matching is DOGE’s stock-in-trade. A Heritage Foundation project had indicated earlier this year that it wanted SSS registration to be used by the Trump 2.0 Administration as a weapon against immigrants, but it’s not clear if that’s the current DOGE plan or how SSS data might be used or abused by DOGE.
That DOGE has now obtained access to SSS data should be a wake-up call to anyone who has trusted SSS assurances as to how information provided to the SSS might be used. Once information is provided to the SSS, registrants have no control as to what new uses might be made of it, even decades later.
If DOGE were actually focused on waste and inefficiency, and if it had the authority to overrule Congressional decisions to create and fund Federal agencies, it would shut down the SSS. But it isn’t, it doesn’t, and it won’t.
Aside from DOGE’s arrival at the SSS, there’s been no announcement of any plan or policy of the Trump 2.0 Administration with respect to the SSS. But the SSS, under the direction of civil servants carried over from previous administrations, is continuing to plan and prepare for an “on demand” military draft – as it has been doing for decades.
Some of these activities, especially the publication sometime later in 2025 of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in the Federal Register to update the SSS regulations and contingency plans for a draft, are likely to be misconstrued by those who haven’t been keeping score.
It’s important to recognize, and to get out the word to those who are less familiar with the SSS, that:
Yes, the SSS is preparing for a draft. Yes, this threat is real. The SSS functions as a threat of U.S. aggression, even when a draft isn’t activated, and threats of coercion are Trump’s stock-in-trade.
No, this isn’t something new with Trump 2.0. This has been the status and role of the SSS since 1980.
What, then, has been happening at the SSS recently — under President Biden and continuing under President Trump — while attention has been focused elsewhere?
The most visible change at the SSS, and the only sign of any directives from President Trump, is the purge from the SSS.gov website of all mention of the possibility of drafting women. Aside from that, the SSS appears to be operating on auto-pilot until Trump gives it new orders or activates a draft.
The major current projects for the SSS are carry-overs from the Biden Administration: trying to find enough volunteers to make the system of draft boards look ready for a draft, and preparing the first major update in decades of the SSS regulations for draft registration and for how a draft would operate if activated.
In February and March of 2025, in response to one of my FOIA requests,the SSS released an updated list of all local board and appeal board members along with – for the first time since 1980 – a list of the county or counties over which each board is assigned jurisdiction.
From March 2021, when the list of draft board members was last released, to March 2025, the number of board members declined from from 9,596 to 5,802. When I asked the SSS about the decline in the number of draft board members, they sent me the following official statement:
The Selective Service reorganized its field offices into regional sites and restructured their lines of effort to ensure the Agency is meeting its mission. The board member program is now under the Operations Readiness Functions division in Aurora, CO (Previously designated as Region 3). As part of this reorganization, this new division purged its board member lists by reaching out to all of its board members to determine their status. We found that many board members had unfortunately passed away, while others had moved to another location in-state or out of state.
In other words, the SSS has so little contact with draft board members that “many” had died without the SSS knowing about it. This is just one more sign of the unreadiness for activation of these boards.
Many draft boards have only one or two members (even if those who have been appointed haven’t died or moved), and could not legally make decisions, in the event of a draft, without a quorum of three including a member from each county over which they have jurisdiction.
The Military Selective Service Act (MSSA) requires each draft board to have at least three members, and requires a multi-county board to have at least one member from each county it covers. So if there is no local board member for a county, or less than three for the board that covers a county, there is no board that would be able to hear claims from residents of that county for deferment or exemption in the event of a draft.
Presumably, the SSS would rush to appoint and try to train new boards and board members after inductions were ordered, in the heat of whatever war fever had prompted activation of a draft.
When I asked about this problem, the SSS spokesperson told me the SSS is considering asking Congress to change the law to allow the SSS to expand the territory of each board to an entire Congressional district, without regard for county boundaries. By reducing the number of boards in less-populous areas with many small counties, this would address some of the difficulty of recruiting enough draft board members. But this would leave the remaining boards overloaded and even less able to process the flood of claims for deferments and exemptions in the event of activation of a draft, or forced to operate with hurriedly appointed, minimally trained new members.
As of March 2025, there was only one member of the National Appeal Board (NAB), Jane H. Macon of San Antonio, TX. Without a quorum of three members, the NAB would be unable to make decisions on any appeals of claims for deferment or exemption. It’s unclear what would happen to draftees who appealed to the NAB. As with local boards, it seems likely that if a draft is activated, new members of the NAB will be appointed in a rush, with no time for training, in the midst of military mobilization.
The SSS indicated in 2024 that it was working on a comprehensive review and “modernization” of its regulations for registration and the draft. In March 2025, a spokesperson for the SSS told me this project was still “ongoing” and that I should expect an update in early April, but as of now there’s been no update. Neither the target date for the NPRM, nor whether it will propose substantive changes in SSS contingency plans, has been disclosed. The proposed rules will call for close reading and responses during the public comment period.
The MSSA at 50 U.S. Code §3803 gives the President the authority to activate a draft:
The President is authorized, from time to time, whether or not a state of war exists, to select and induct into the Armed Forces of the United States for training and service in the manner provided in this title (said sections) (including but not limited to selection and induction by age group or age groups) such number of persons as may be required to provide and maintain the strength of the Armed Forces.
But a later section of the MSSA, 50 U.S. Code § 3815, enacted in 1971, sunset this Presidential authority in 1973.:
Notwithstanding any other provisions of this chapter, no person shall be inducted for training and service in the Armed Forces after July 1, 1973, except persons now or hereafter deferred under section 3806 of this chapter after the basis for such deferment ceases to exist.
Congressional action would thus be needed to reinstate Presidential authority to order inductions, although since the rest of the MSSA and the SSS regulations to implement it remain on the books, Congress would only need to enact a one-sentence bill repealing 50 U.S. Code § 3815(c).
[CORRECTION: In the original version of this article, I overlooked the “sunset” provision in §3815(c), and mis-read §3803, standing alone, as indicating that the President still had the authority to order inductions without further action by Congress. I have corrected this article, and apologize for the error.]
The President would also normally go to Congress for additional funding to administer a draft. But Trump hasn’t shown restraint in reallocating funds, especially for activities that can be justified by claims of “national emergency” or “military necessity”. And the SSS could activate a draft, using funds already appropriated for the year, even if that would burn through its budget long before the end of the fiscal year.
Although it’s a distinct question, the requirement for young men to register with the SSS was ended in 1975 by Presidential Proclamation, not by Congress, and resumed by Presidential Proclamation (still in force) in 1980. The Congressional debate in 1980 was over funding for the resumption of draft registration, not over whether to continue Presidential authority to order young men to register.
Legislation authorizing and appropriating funds for activation of a draft could include instructions as to who would be drafted or how they would be drafted, which might differ from any of the current contingency plans. Nobody — including the SSS itself — can say now, with certainty, what else Congress might include in legislation authorizing a draft.
Descriptions of “How a draft would work” necessarily depend on speculation as to what Congress would do. Congress might find it easiest simply to authorize and appropriate funds for the SSS to activate one or both of its current contingency plans (for a general draft or a draft of health care workers). But some issues — such as whether to rely on the current registration list or some newly-generated list, whether to include women, and what deferments or exemptions to provide — would likely be argued about and decided, unpredictably, by Congress.
Neither potential draftees, draft counselors, nor draft lawyers can be sure that any particular deferment or exemption will be included in whatever Congress authorizes, or what the criteria for any deferment or exemption or for assignment to alternative service as a conscientious objector will be.
Those who are already registered won’t be given the option to cancel their registration if they don’t like the new rules of a new draft, or the new uses made of registration data by DOGE or other agencies with which DOGE shares it. Potential draftees should be aware that if they register with the SSS, they are putting their names in the pool not only for a draft under the present standby regulations whenever Congress authorizes and the President orders it, but for whatever draft, on whatever terms, Congress may authorize. And we now know that they are also making their information available for whatever use DOGE wants to make of it.
If you don’t want to take this risk, don’t register — and work to repeal the Military Selective Service Act.
Source: https://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/002781.html
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