As news sites like Military Times first reported last week, the government is moving ahead with a proposal to start automatically registering American men aged 18–26 for the draft starting this December.
In practice, all this actually means is that men in that cohort will lose a chore: They were already required by law, under penalty of up to five years in prison, to sign up for the draft and to notify the government of any changes of address within 30 days. The system was instituted in its current form by the warlike Jimmy Carter on July 2, 1980. So for the last 46 years, we’ve had a situation where many young men routinely committed a serious federal crime every time they move.
Making draft registration automatic rather than something that requires filling out a form, then, is really a minor good governance reform by the Trump administration. It means the country can maintain its theoretical reserve stock of draftable men bureaucratically organized without, as a function of that, threatening millions of Americans with prosecution if they forget to do paperwork properly.
