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Trump Administration Wants to Make It More Difficult to Evade a Military Draft

With automatic Selective Service registration, it would be harder for Americans to dodge a potential military draft.

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.

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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........

© The Intercept