Congress drops provision for women to register for the draft
Negotiators stripped a Selective Service expansion from the final defense bill after Sen. Josh Hawley threatened to sink the whole package.
Congressional negotiators dropped a provision that would have required women to register for the Selective Service from the final, compromise version of the fiscal year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, Military.com reported Dec. 7, 2021, reversing a measure that had cleared both chambers' armed services committees with bipartisan support.
The removal came after Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., led opposition to the measure and threatened to block the broader defense bill if it remained, according to Military.com. Hawley's office said he would "keep fighting for a vote on the Senate floor to strip this wrong and misguided provision out of the final bill" if it were not removed in negotiations.
How the provision got this far
The Senate Armed Services Committee approved the draft-registration expansion 21-5 in July 2021, and the House Armed Services Committee followed with a 35-24 vote in September, per Military.com's timeline — bipartisan margins in both chambers that made the measure's eventual removal in the final conference process notable.
The opposition's framing
Conservative opponents characterized the measure as an attempt to "draft our daughters," Military.com reported, a framing that mobilized opposition despite the provision's committee-level bipartisan backing. The report did not specify a replacement mechanism, saying only that the provision was omitted from the compromise bill rather than substituted with alternative language in that account.
Hawley's monthslong campaign against it
Hawley's office had been building pressure against the provision for weeks before the final bill emerged. In a November 2021 release, Hawley's office said the senator was leading an effort to strip the language, with Hawley arguing, "It is wrong to force our daughters, mothers, wives, and sisters to fight our wars." His office distinguished that position from opposition to women serving voluntarily, saying women who choose to serve in the armed forces deserve gratitude, but that mandatory conscription was a different matter. Hawley had also threatened to hold up the broader NDAA over the issue if the provision was not removed in conference, according to Military.com's account of the negotiations.
A four-decade-old legal question
The male-only registration requirement Congress left in place traces to a 1981 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Rostker v. Goldberg, which upheld Congress's choice to register only men after President Jimmy Carter had recommended registering women too following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Writing for a 6-3 majority, Justice William Rehnquist reasoned that men and women were "not similarly situated" for draft purposes because women were then barred from combat roles: "Since women are excluded from combat, Congress concluded that they would not be needed in the event of a draft, and therefore decided not to register them," he wrote. Justice Thurgood Marshall dissented, arguing the government had not shown that including women would meaningfully hinder military readiness. The combat exclusion underlying the 1981 ruling no longer exists — the Pentagon opened all military occupations, including combat roles, to women by 2015 — which is part of why supporters argued the registration requirement needed updating, even as the 2021 push to do so ultimately failed.
What it signals
The provision's fall illustrates how a measure with committee-level bipartisan support in both chambers — a 21-5 Senate Armed Services Committee vote and a 35-24 House Armed Services Committee vote — can still be stripped in conference when a small, determined bloc threatens to withhold votes on a must-pass bill like the NDAA. It left the underlying question — whether Selective Service registration should extend to women — unresolved rather than settled, with opponents winning by leverage over the final vehicle rather than by defeating the policy on its merits in committee.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by Military.com and Sen. Josh Hawley's office. It restores a story originally published on this site in December 2021; figures are as reported at the time.