Source: United States Senator for Massachusetts – Elizabeth Warren
July 11, 2025
Warren: “The choice will belong to our military to make the right economic decision to purchase and then the right economic decisions down the line on how to repair it.”
Sheehy: “We’re at a point where we’ll have systems that are not ready for missions overseas in war zones, on ships, at forward-deployed bases, and we can’t conduct basic repairs to those systems.”
Full Interview (YouTube)
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.), who are both members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sat down with CBS’s Caitlin Huey-Burns to highlight their Warrior Right to Repair Act of 2025, which would require contractors to provide the Department of Defense access to technical data and materials the military needs to repair and maintain its own equipment. This legislation aims to reduce government spending, promote competition, and improve military readiness. Portions of the bill are included in the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act of 2026.
Watch the interview here and read the full transcript below:
CBS News: Why Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Sheehy are teaming up to tame Pentagon spending
July 10, 2025
Caitlin Huey-Burns: Why can’t the military fix its own equipment?
Senator Elizabeth Warren: You want to go first, Tim?
Senator Tim Sheehy: Well, we’ve had decades of bureaucratic sclerosis that have created a really broken system that’s rife with perverse incentives. It’s also rife with requirements that aren’t always grounded in what the warfighter actually needs, and a huge focus on process over outcome. We’re at a point where we’ll have systems that are not ready for missions overseas in war zones, on ships, at forward-deployed bases, and we can’t conduct basic repairs to those systems. And I think we’re at a point now where we’ve seen multiple theaters of war, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Israel to Ukraine. We’re understanding the limits of this current defense acquisition paradigm, and it’s about time we fix it. So, it’s not one thing that happened. It’s an accumulation of 30 years of bureaucracy that’s kind of led to where we’re at now.
Senator Warren: And I would just add to what Senator Sheehy says here by pointing out that the defense contractors have figured out they get two bites at every apple this way. So, they sell you the initial product, whether it’s an oven on a submarine or it’s a fancy piece of warfighting equipment—that’s one—and they negotiate a price for that, but they hold back in the fine print. You can’t fix it yourself. So, when the safety clip breaks, when you get sand down in the equipment, and you need to mess with it some more, the answer is, too often, because of what’s in that contract that the military says to our service member, don’t touch that thing. You’ve got to retire, in effect, the piece of equipment, hold it over there, call a contractor, have the contractor fly in from a long, long way away, charge us for flying in, take the delay and charge us whatever they want to charge us to come in and fix that thing. That has turned out to be a very profitable model for some of the defense contractors. And what our bill says is no more, no more. The Defense Department, going forward, if our bill is signed into law, it basically says, here’s the deal: you negotiate the price to buy the thing, and if the thing breaks, we may fix it ourselves. We may go to another small business, a startup, some guy who set up shop to be able to fix just that kind of thing. Or we may come back to the manufacturer. But the choice will belong to our military to make the right economic decision to purchase and then the right economic decisions down the line on how to repair it.
Caitlin Huey-Burns: What about the argument, though, that the contractor knows the equipment better than anyone else has the ability to fix it better than anyone? Why shouldn’t they be allowed to be the ones?
Senator Warren: Let them compete. They want to offer. They want to say, “Hey, we can fix that.” You know what? I’ll bet if that happened, that the price of fixing it would go down, if there were competition—that is, if other little guys were in there saying, “Hey, we can fix this.” Or, let’s face it, the servicemember, himself or herself, who actually also knows this stuff. Let’s have that open competition. That’s what we need here on the military side, and frankly, it’s what we need throughout the country, whether we’re talking about cars or tractors or telephones, or anything else. But we’re starting here.
Caitlin Huey-Burns: So, you’re saying—you’re not saying that the contractor won’t be able to fix the equipment, they just can’t have a monopoly in it?
Senator Warren: That’s right, that they negotiated up front in fine print when nobody was looking and nobody was pricing it in. That’s where they’re making off like bandits.
Caitlin Huey-Burns: And Senator Sheehy, you approach this issue as a former seal officer. What kind of impact—Senator Warren talked about the financial aspects of this. What kind of impact has this had on the battlefield, on training, on our soldiers out there? What does it mean for military readiness?
Senator Sheehy: Less. Less readiness, to put it bluntly. We’ve had less readiness as a result of this. Now, our acquisition paradigm was really designed in the 1950s and 60s and hasn’t really changed since then. And in fairness to the Pentagon individuals and the contractors together, much of that’s been on us. We have not forced an upgrade to our DFARS, defense acquisition regulations, that govern the entire federal acquisition environment. We have not forced them to upgrade those, and it’s about time we do, because the systems simply were not as complicated. Software. Software is becoming one of the core pieces of functional equipment that we have.
Caitlin Huey-Burns: You two come from very different parties. You’re a very conservative Republican. You’re a very progressive Democrat. How is it that you two found this common ground? How is it that you guys came together on this piece of legislation?
Senator Sheehy: Well, I was making the rounds as a freshman who’s never served in any political office before, when I got here, I said, the first thing I do is I’m trying to meet with every single member I can, on both parties, and just introduce myself and get some advice and wisdom. And in our first meeting, you know, we just—she said, “Well, what do you want to do when you’re here?” And I listed the handful of things I wanted to focus on. One of them was defense acquisition reform. And I kind of went on my riff about how frustrated I was.
Caitlin Huey-Burns: Your eyes light up.
Senator Warren: I did.
Senator Sheehy: She popped up like an aerobics video, like, “That, we’re going to do it.” And we dug into it.
Caitlin Huey-Burns: “That’s my language.”
Senator Warren: Exactly, I said, “Another nerd, we can do this. We can do this.” But it is, there are these places that this isn’t political. This is about doing what is right.