The Guardline
The Selective Service System, the government agency that keeps a list of draft-eligible American men, will begin automatically registering names later this year, abandoning a decades-old process in which young men self-registered.
“This has been in the works for quite a while,” a U.S. government official told The Intercept, noting that the Selective Service System — which is separate from the Defense Department — had been pressing Congress to revamp the registration process. The official referenced “sliding numbers” of men registering on their own and the potential of war with a near-peer power like China. The official also mentioned a Trump administration “obsession” with creating “comprehensive federal databases.”
Men ages 18 to 25 who are eligible to be drafted have been required to register with the government since 1980. Failure to do so is a felony, which bars unregistered men from most federal jobs, eligibility for student loans, and carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
More than 100 million men have registered in the last 46 years. But according to the Selective Service, just 81 percent of eligible men registered in 2024, a 3 percent point drop from the prior year.
On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Donald Trump “keeps his options on the table,” when Fox News host Maria Bartiromo asked her about the possibility of a return of the draft. But Trump would be required to get approval from Congress to enact a draft, which was last used during the Vietnam War.
A peacetime draft, begun in 1948, was key to fighting the war in Vietnam and also fomenting resistance to it. About one-third of the American men who served in Vietnam were drafted, and roughly another third enlisted to avoid the draft. A 1968 Department of Defense survey found that 47 percent of volunteers said draft motivations — such as attempting to exercise some measure of control over the timing of their service or the military branch — were their most important reason for enlisting. Patriotism, by comparison, was cited by 6 percent of enlistees.
Beginning in 1964, students began burning their draft cards as acts of draft resistance. Five years later, student body presidents of more than 250 universities wrote to the White House to say they planned to refuse military induction. Many American men claimed conscientious objector status, refused induction, or fled abroad to Canada, Mexico, Sweden, or elsewhere. It is estimated that around 570,000 men classified as draft offenders.
Throughout the war, men of privilege found sanctuary from the draft through a wide variety of means. Deferments were automatically available for those in graduate school, until 1968, and college until 1973. Around 3.5 million men also received medical exemptions. While the poorest Americans were forced to rely on military doctors for their military physicals, affluent men could visit private physicians and obtain letters to excuse them for even the most minor injuries. One study found that 90 percent of men able to press such claims were successful, even if they were in good health. Trump himself was granted five draft deferments, including for a diagnosis of bone spurs, provided by a doctor who rented his office from Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump.
Draft evasion and resistance became so widespread that it almost crippled the Selective Service System. Draftees were also in revolt within the armed forces, leaving the military on the brink of collapse by the early 1970s. When Col. Robert Heinl, a distinguished combat veteran as well as a military historian and analyst, examined the state of the military in Armed Forces Journal in 1971, his evaluation was dire:
The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug- ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinous.
That same year, President Richard Nixon signed legislation authorizing the end of the draft. The last draftees reported for duty on June 30, 1973, and the next day, the all-volunteer force was established. The Defense Department now celebrates this as “a return to the tradition of voluntary service in the military.” The Pentagon has been able to effectively control this far more docile force where “every soldier, Marine, sailor, airman and guardian in the military today is a volunteer.”
On December 18, 2025, Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act for 2026, mandating automatic Selective Service System registration. The agency’s proposal to automatically enroll men was then submitted to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs on March 30. After review, the Selective Service plan will need to be coordinated with other federal agencies that could potentially share personal information about draft-eligible men, including the Social Security Administration and Census Bureau. “SSS will implement the change by December 2026, resulting in a streamlined registration process and corresponding workforce realignment,” according to Selective Service.
The government official said they did not believe that the new Selective Service registration process was geared toward “generating cannon fodder” for a ground invasion of Iran or any of the other fronts in Trump’s mushrooming world war. “This is about effective manpower generation, channeling, management, and surveillance,” the official told The Intercept.
