Holy fucking shit!!

"In February 2025, I wrote about something that almost happened. A provision in the House-passed FY2025 NDAA would have transformed the Selective Service System from voluntary self-registration into automatic, database-driven enrollment of every draft-age male in the country.

It was stripped from the final bill before President Biden signed it in December 2024. I argued at the time that its removal didn’t mean the idea was dead.

The 57-1 vote in the House Armed Services Committee, the bipartisan enthusiasm, the obvious political utility of keeping a draft on a hair trigger—all of it pointed toward a second attempt.

That second attempt succeeded, and in a context far worse than I anticipated.

On December 18, 2025, Trump signed the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act into law.

Section 535 mandates that the Selective Service System automatically register all male U.S. residents aged 18 to 26 using existing federal databases.

The provision takes effect in one year. It passed 312-112 in the House and 77-20 in the Senate. Nobody held a press conference about it.

Between my original article and this one, the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, intervened militarily in Venezuela, deployed the National Guard to American cities, and authorized the largest defense budget in history. A new National Defense Strategy explicitly prepares for “prolonged, multi-domain conflicts.”

Quiet draft plans are now law, being implemented against a backdrop of active warfare.

Under the new law, the SSS must “identify, locate, and register” every male person residing in the United States between 18 and 26 by aggregating data from other federal agencies—Social Security, IRS, immigration records, whatever else the SSS Director “determines necessary.”

This replaces a self-registration system in place since 1980. Under that framework, young men were supposed to sign up voluntarily; most didn’t. Compliance has been abysmal for decades. Bernard Rostker, who ran the SSS from 1979 to 1981, testified in 2019 that the existing database would be “less than useless” for an actual draft.

Congress had an obvious alternative: abolish a system that hasn’t worked in 45 years. Instead, it chose to expand the system’s reach and its access to Americans’ personal data."