Right to Repair Just Flipped the Burden of Proof in Defense Contracts

A bipartisan FY27 NDAA amendment would make government-purpose rights the default. Here’s what actually changed, and what contractors should be doing about it.

The most consequential vote in the House’s FY27 defense markup wasn’t about a weapons program. It was about who owns the right to fix one.

The House Armed Services Committee spent fourteen hours grinding through more than 900 amendments before sending its roughly $1.15 trillion National Defense Authorization Act to the full House on a 44-12 vote. Most of that debate split along party lines. One amendment didn’t. A bipartisan “right to repair” measure from Reps. Maggie Goodlander (D-NH) and Pat Harrigan (R-NC) drew support from both sides of the aisle, passed by voice vote, and quietly rewrote a default that has shaped defense contracting for decades.

If you deliver technical data or software to the Department of Defense, this is the part of the markup worth your attention.

The default just inverted

Here’s the mechanism, stripped of the floor speeches.

Under the amendment, government-purpose rights would become the default for any technical data, software, and software documentation delivered under future DoD contracts. The contractor no longer starts from a position of broad protection. To keep tighter intellectual property rights, a company would have to make its case affirmatively.

That means itemizing each piece of data or software it believes deserves special protection, producing evidence that the technology was developed with private funding, and citing the specific clauses that justify unlimited-rights exclusions. As Federal News Network reported, if a contractor fails to provide that documentation, the Pentagon would automatically receive government-purpose rights.

Read that again, because it’s the whole story. For years the presumption ran the other way. The burden lived with the government to negotiate for the rights it wanted. This flips it onto the contractor to prove what it gets to hold back.

It’s worth noting the underlying bill wasn’t silent on the issue. The chairman’s mark already included Section 842, which would create a formal mediation process for IP disputes between the Pentagon and contractors. Supporters of the amendment argued that wasn’t enough — that a mediation process still lets a company stall by claiming almost anything qualifies as a trade secret. They wanted a default, not a referee.

The readiness argument

The case for the amendment is built on a single word: readiness.

Military leaders have spent the past several budget cycles telling Congress the same thing. Contractual restrictions sometimes make it impossible for troops to repair their own equipment, which drives up cost, stretches out maintenance timelines, and leaves capability sitting idle. Goodlander framed the status quo as a broken system that has cost taxpayers billions and undercut military readiness.

Harrigan put it in blunter terms during the markup. He pointed to fleets where, by his account, planes can’t fly, ships can’t sail, and vehicles can’t drive — with that figure approaching half the force in some services. Strip out the rhetoric and the logic is hard to argue with in a contested-environment scenario: if your maintainers can’t touch the gear without a contractor’s sign-off, you don’t actually control your own sustainment.

This isn’t a fringe position, either. Service secretaries across the Pentagon have backed the underlying idea, which is part of why a Democrat and a Republican could co-sponsor it in a markup that otherwise broke down along party lines on nearly everything else.

Industry is not on board

The pushback is real, and it’s organized.

The Aerospace Industries Association and the National Defense Industrial Association have lobbied against the measure, and contractors have argued the legislation would force them to hand over intellectual property they developed on their own dime. HASC Chairman Mike Rogers gave that concern a voice during the markup, warning that the amendment grants the government extremely broad rights to IP developed at private expense and could push companies to choose between guarding their IP and working with the Pentagon at all.

Rep. Rob Wittman, who said he supports right-to-repair in principle, called this particular version too sweeping — worried it hands the government broad access with thin guardrails against that data moving to a third party. Harrigan’s rebuttal was that the amendment carves out commercial items and doesn’t seize patents, copyrights, or trade secrets outright. Both things can be true: the principle has wide support, and the drafting details are exactly where this fight will be won or lost.

What contractors should do now

This is committee text, not law. It still has to clear the full House and survive reconciliation with the Senate, and the history here is instructive — a version of right-to-repair made it through committee last year and didn’t survive into the final FY26 NDAA, though that law did require DoD to start building a digital system to track technical data rights. The direction of travel has been consistent for two budget cycles running. Betting on it disappearing is the riskier wager.

A few moves worth making while the language is still moving:

• Inventory your data deliverables. Know which contracts hinge on restrictive data rights and which technologies you can actually document as privately funded. If the burden shifts to you, that documentation becomes your leverage.
• Tighten your funding paper trail. “Developed at private expense” is easy to assert and hard to prove after the fact. The companies that win these arguments will be the ones with clean records — the same documentation discipline that keeps you audit-ready — not the ones with the best lawyers.
• Watch the Senate. This is where comparable language died last year. The shape of the final provision — if there is one — gets decided in conference.
• Reframe internally. If your business model leans on controlling sustainment through data rights, the ground may be moving. Better to model that scenario now than to react to it after enactment.

The headline writes itself as a clash between readiness and IP. The more useful framing is simpler. A default that protected contractors by reflex is being rewritten to protect the government by reflex, and the proof now has to come from your side of the table. Plan accordingly.

Sources: Breaking Defense, Federal News Network, Roll Call, The Hill, and Rep. Goodlander’s office.