The Right to Repair: Saving Americans Money Through Repair

From aircraft carriers to family smartphones, repair restrictions cost Americans billions. As America celebrates 250 years of independence, discover why the Right to Repair saves taxpayers, families, farmers, and businesses money while protecting one of our most fundamental freedoms: the right to fix what we own.

Every year, Americans spend billions replacing electronics, appliances, and equipment that could have been repaired for a fraction of the cost. Most of the time, the broken device is not the real problem. The real problem is that someone else has decided whether you are even allowed to fix what you own.

That single decision reaches from the kitchen counter to the flight deck, and it quietly costs all of us money. Just ask the United States Navy.

If the Navy can't fix its own ovens, what chance do you have?

It happened on the USS Gerald R. Ford, the newest and largest aircraft carrier in the fleet, a ship that cost roughly $13 billion and feeds a crew of more than 4,500. The Ford serves about 15,300 meals a day. So when six of its eight main ovens went down and only two were left working, that was a real problem.

Here is the part that should stop you cold. The sailors were not allowed to fix them. The crew was trained, capable, and ready. But the repair was locked behind the manufacturer's contract terms. They had to wait for licensed outside contractors to come aboard and do the work. The Navy's own secretary at the time described the situation to a Senate committee and said plainly that he had become a huge supporter of right to repair after seeing it firsthand.

Think about that. A $13 billion warship, sidelined in the galley, because someone wrote a clause saying the people who own the ship are not permitted to fix it.

This is not a Navy problem

It is everyone's problem. The same rule that grounded those ovens is sitting quietly inside your phone, your laptop, your washing machine, and your car. The bill it runs up lands on everyone: taxpayers, families, farmers, and small businesses alike.

That is it. Not a handout. Not a loophole. Just the plain meaning of the word "own."

What has happened instead is that a lot of Big Tech has quietly rewritten that meaning. Through software locks, glued-in parts, and contracts most of us never read, ownership has been turned into something closer to a long-term rental. You bought it. They kept the keys.

If you are facing a repair-or-replace decision right now, our Repair Shop Finder can help you locate a trusted independent repair shop near you before you spend money on something new.

The founders would recognize this fight

Here is where Independence Day stops being a backdrop and starts being the point.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of farmers, printers, and tradesmen decided they were done being told what they could and could not do by a distant power that made the rules and answered to no one. That was the whole idea. Self-government. Self-reliance. The right to run your own life and your own property without asking permission from far away.

These were practical, hands-on people. Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, the Franklin stove, and bifocals, and he refused to patent any of them, because he believed useful things should be free for everyone to use and improve. Thomas Jefferson spent his life tinkering at Monticello, redesigning plows and gadgets and anything else he could get his hands on. Repair and improvement were not hobbies to them. They were the texture of a free and independent life.

It is not hard to imagine how those men would feel about a world where a company can reach across the country, into a device sitting on your kitchen table, and decide whether you are allowed to fix it. They fought a war over less.

Farmers have been living this for years

If you want to see where this road leads, look at the people who feed us.

A modern tractor is a computer with wheels. When one breaks down, the diagnostic software is often locked, which means a farmer can be stuck on a dead tractor in the middle of harvest, watching the weather turn, waiting days for an authorized technician to drive out and plug in a laptop. Harvest does not wait. The crop does not care about a service queue.

Farmers have been fighting this lockout for years, and it is the same playbook that grounded the Navy's ovens. A combine, a carrier, and a cell phone, all running on the same logic: you bought it, but you do not get to fix it.

What does the repair lockout actually cost you?

The bill for all of this lands in your lap, usually without you noticing.

It shows up when a $40 repair gets quoted as a reason to just buy a new one. It shows up as a perfectly good device tossed in a drawer or a landfill because no one was allowed to open it. It shows up when the photos and files on a "dead" phone feel unreachable, when often they are not.

Those small choices add up to real money. U.S. PIRG estimates that repairing electronics and appliances instead of replacing them could save the average American household about $382 a year, which works out to close to $50 billion across the country.

The military version is almost comic. In one example raised on the Senate floor, a single broken knob in a Black Hawk helicopter, a part worth about $15, could take the whole aircraft out of service, because fixing it the official way meant paying the contractor roughly $47,000 of taxpayer money to replace an entire screen system. Multiply that kind of logic across every phone, laptop, and appliance in the country, and you start to see the size of the quiet tax we all pay for not being allowed to repair.

Small businesses feel it too. A shop or office forced to replace a fleet of laptops or a locked point-of-sale system, instead of repairing them, watches its costs climb for the very same reason.

This is why the choice to repair instead of replace matters. Choosing electronics repair over a brand-new purchase keeps money in your pocket, keeps working hardware out of the landfill, and keeps real consumer choice alive.

Why repair matters more as electronics get pricier

Here is the other half of the math, and it is moving in the wrong direction. The price of new electronics is climbing. In June 2026, Apple raised prices on its Macs and iPads, with the MacBook Air jumping from $1,099 to $1,299 and the MacBook Pro from $1,699 to $1,999, pointing to the soaring cost of memory and storage chips driven by the AI boom. The company's chief executive, Tim Cook, said the increases had become "unavoidable."

And this is not one company. Microsoft and the major PC makers raised prices too, and analysts expect phones to follow. When a replacement costs more every year, the value of fixing what you already own goes up right along with it. A screen or battery repair that was the smart financial move last year is an even smarter one now. Affordability is exactly why the freedom to repair matters, and why it matters more than ever.

Is right to repair actually winning?

Yes. This is the part the doom stories leave out. It is winnable, and it is being won.

State by state, the map is filling in. Connecticut's consumer right to repair law for electronics takes effect July 1, 2026. Texas follows in September 2026. With those two on the books, more than a third of Americans will live in a state with an enforceable repair law, up from roughly a quarter at the start of the year.

The military fight is moving too. After right to repair provisions were stripped out of last year's defense bill following a heavy lobbying push, both the House and Senate wrote them back into this year's version. The Army's secretary told the Senate it was "one of the most important things," and warned that repair restrictions "could be the decisive point between us being successful somewhere 6,000 miles away in the Indo-Pacific or failing our mission."

And this is not a left or right issue. A 2026 poll found that nearly 79 percent of voters support letting service members repair their own equipment, with strong majorities across Republicans, Democrats, and independents. When that many of us agree on anything, it is worth paying attention.

Real independence, the kind you can hold in your hands

Strip away the fireworks and the cookouts, and Independence Day is about one thing. Not being controlled by a distant power that makes the rules for you and benefits when you cannot push back.

Right to repair is that same idea, brought down to the scale of the things you actually own. The Navy, the farmer, and you are all standing on the same line, in the same fight, facing the same playbook. The most American thing about a device you paid for is the right to keep it running, on your terms, for as long as you can.

The dollars and the freedom are not two separate arguments. They are the same one. Every repair you are allowed to make is money kept in your pocket and a small piece of independence kept in your hands.

This year, as we mark 250 years of independence, that feels worth standing up for.

Here is what you can do

Two simple things.

First, use the freedom you already have. If something is broken, you do not have to replace it, and you do not have to hand it straight to Big Tech. Find a trusted local repair shop near you and get a real quote first.

Find a trusted repair shop near you →

Second, add your voice. These repair laws pass when enough regular people show up and make it clear they want the right to fix what they own. Stand with the TCA and the rest of the movement through United We Repair.

Add your voice to the fight →

Military, farmers, you. Same fight, same side. Happy Independence Day.

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