Right to Repair

The Problem

You buy a refrigerator.  Three years later a $4 relay fails.  The manufacturer will not sell you the relay.  They will not sell it to the appliance repair shop down the street, either.  They will sell you a service call—at their price, on their schedule—or they will sell you a new refrigerator.  The old one goes to a landfill.

This is not an accident.  It is a business model.  Manufacturers across every product category—consumer electronics, automobiles, farm equipment, home appliances, powered wheelchairs—have systematically designed their products to prevent repair by the people who own them.  They glue batteries in place.  They encode parts with serial numbers so that a functionally identical replacement triggers an error message.  They refuse to publish service manuals.  They refuse to sell spare parts.  They use Digital Rights Management locks to prevent independent technicians from running diagnostic software.  And when legislatures try to stop them, they spend millions in lobbying to kill the bills.  [1]

The Federal Trade Commission investigated these practices and published its findings in 2021.  The conclusion was unambiguous: manufacturers provided “scant evidence” to support their justifications for repair restrictions.  [2]  Not weak evidence.  Not contested evidence.  Scant evidence.  The FTC found that manufacturers restrict repair through deliberate product design, limited parts availability, unavailable diagnostic software, and overbroad assertion of intellectual property rights—and that none of the safety, security, or liability rationales offered in defense of these practices held up to scrutiny.  [3]

The scale of the resulting waste is staggering.  Global electronic waste reached 62 million metric tonnes in 2022, with a documented collection and recycling rate of just 22 percent.  [4]  The United States alone produces more than 3.4 million tons of e-waste per year.  [5]  Every unrepairable product that goes to a landfill represents not only the waste of the product itself but the waste of the mining, refining, manufacturing, and shipping that produced it—and the identical waste stream required to produce its replacement.

The Aircraft Carrier Test

The objection you will hear from industry is that modern products are too complex for consumers to repair safely.  This is a lie, and it can be disproven with a single example.

The United States Navy operates nuclear-powered aircraft carriers—the most complex mobile machines ever built by human beings.  A Nimitz-class carrier displaces over 100,000 tons.  It carries two nuclear reactors, four steam turbine engines, four bronze propellers each over 21 feet in diameter, steam catapults, arresting gear, a self-contained aviation fuel distribution system, weapons magazines, desalination plants, and enough electrical generating capacity to power a small city.  It is, by any rational measure, more complex than your dishwasher.

And it is designed, from the keel up, to be maintained by its crew.  The average age of the crew aboard USS Nimitz is 19.  [6]  Not 29.  Not 39.  Nineteen.  The most powerful warship on Earth is maintained by teenagers—not by the shipyard that built it, not by a Huntington Ingalls service technician flown out at $400 an hour, but by young enlisted sailors with high school diplomas and Navy technical training, working with published technical manuals, standardized tools, and available replacement parts.

We do this because the Navy understands something that consumer product manufacturers pretend not to know: if you want a machine to stay operational, you design it so the people who use it can maintain it.  You write the manuals.  You stock the parts.  You design for access, for modularity, for diagnosis, and for repair.  This is not charity.  It is engineering discipline.  It is what competent design looks like.

If Huntington Ingalls and General Dynamics can design warships to be maintainable by young enlisted sailors, then Apple can design a phone with a replaceable battery.  John Deere can provide diagnostic software to the farmers who bought their tractors.  Samsung can sell replacement screens at a fair price.  The engineering is not the obstacle.  The obstacle is the profit motive in making repair impossible.

The Proof: Congress Sold Out the Troops

If there were any remaining doubt that repair restrictions exist to protect profits rather than consumers, Congress eliminated it in December 2025.

Both the House and Senate versions of the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act included bipartisan provisions requiring defense contractors to provide the military with the technical data, parts, and repair information needed to maintain its own equipment.  The provisions had support from the Trump administration, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force.  Army Secretary Dan Driscoll was publicly outspoken in favor, calling defense contractors’ claim that the Army could not be trusted with sensitive repair data “one of the most preposterous things I have heard.”  [7]

Both provisions were stripped from the final bill behind closed doors after an intensive lobbying campaign by defense contractors.  [1]  The National Defense Industrial Association argued that allowing the military to repair its own equipment would “hamper innovation.”  The Aerospace Industries Association claimed it would “cripple the very innovation on which our warfighters depend.”  The House Armed Services Committee leaders who controlled the conference process had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from defense companies.  [1]

Read that again.  Defense contractors successfully lobbied Congress to prevent American soldiers from fixing their own equipment in the field—equipment bought with taxpayer money—because independent repair threatened their service-contract revenue.  If that is the argument against repairability when national security and military readiness are on the line, imagine how much less principled the argument is when it comes to your washing machine.

What I Propose

First: Design for Maintainability.  Every product sold in the United States must be constructed in such a way that it is maintainable by the end user.  Manufacturers must provide complete repair documentation, make diagnostic tools and software available without restriction, and design products so that components can be accessed and replaced using standard or manufacturer-provided tools.  Serial-number pairing, software locks, and other technical measures that serve no function except to prevent third-party repair shall be prohibited.

Second: Parts Availability.  Manufacturers must make replacement parts available at fair and reasonable prices for a minimum of ten years from the date of last manufacture, or for one-half of the product’s reasonably expected useful life, whichever is greater.  A refrigerator with a 20-year expected life requires 10 years of parts.  An aircraft engine with a 40-year service life requires 20.  A smartphone with a 5-year expected life still requires the 10-year minimum.

This is not radical.  The European Union’s Directive on the repair of goods, which member states must implement by July 2026, already requires manufacturers to repair products within a reasonable time at a reasonable price and to provide spare parts at reasonable prices—and explicitly prohibits design techniques intended to prevent repair.  [4]  We are behind, not ahead.

And this is not impractical.  We design multi-billion-dollar aircraft carriers to be maintained by teenagers.  We can require that a toaster be fixable by the person who bought it.

The only objection is greed.  And greed is not a policy argument.  It is the thing policy exists to restrain.

How We’ll Know It’s Working