NEW YORK -- New NFLPA president Eric Winston said the NFL's plan for HGH testing is on hold because players don't agree with the league's stipulation that commissioner Roger Goodell be the final arbiter in particular disputes around the testing process or the results.

"It's there when [Goodell] wants to sign it," Winston said. "I kind of laugh because it keeps coming up. If he wants HGH testing as bad as he wants to retain his power, then we would have had HGH testing last year. At the end of the day, that's what this is all about: He wants to hold all the cards and he wants to be the judge, jury and executioner, and we're not going to go for an un-American system like that."

Winston made the comments during a meeting at a midtown hotel Wednesday, the day before the first round of the NFL draft.

League spokesman Greg Aiello responded to Winston's remarks Thursday in an email to ESPN.

"It is kind of funny because since 2011 the union has come up with one excuse after another to avoid implementing an agreement to test for HGH," Aiello wrote. "First, it was the testing method; then it was the population study; now it's commissioner authority. Our commitment to testing is clear. The same cannot be said of the union."

The issue has been a lingering point of contention for both sides since a new collective bargaining agreement was passed in 2011, and it arose again this week when Goodell renewed his call for the union to sign an HGH agreement.

"The world has accepted the science," Goodell said in an interview with NFL Network. "There's global understanding of that. And the union needs to sign off on that. It's time to sign off on what we agreed to. They have raised issues. We have addressed all those issues. They're now raising, from time to time, issues that are completely unrelated to HGH testing."