My brother – who is active military – is shipping out again shortly.
He didn’t know until today whether he would get paid.
The political theatre of the “will they or won’t they?” in Congress over the shutdown may make good headlines.
But for the 1.4 million active-duty personnel in the military (chart downloads as a pdf), it’s anything but drama: it’s real life.
With the shutdown looming, my brother – and those like him – had to face the possibility of going to work every day without the guarantee of a paycheck.
Of course, nobody likes the idea of going to work and not getting a check. But imagine deploying to a war zone and not knowing whether your loved ones would be able to make rent while you were gone. Or setting foot on a destroyer and not knowing when the next paycheck would hit your account to pay for food for your kids. Or jetting off to one of the more than 150 countries in the world (downloads as an .xlsx file) where the U.S. has troops without knowing whether there will be money in the bank when you return.
Fortunately, in the middle of all of the shutdown/budget/Obamacare craziness, Congress could agree on one thing: active-duty military should continue to get paid.
Today, the Senate approved a bill that would ensure that active-duty military personnel, including reservists on full-time active duty, receive a paycheck if (er, when) the government shuts down. The bill, H.R. 3210, was introduced by Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO). The official debate on the bill began in the House on Saturday at 10:55 p.m.; the vote was held just after midnight on Sunday and passed unanimously. Today, Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) passed the Senate’s version of the bill, the “Pay Our Military Act,” through a unanimous consent agreement. President Obama signed the bill into law this evening.
Under the provisions of the new law, in addition to active-duty military, civilian employees of the Department of Defense and Pentagon contractors deemed to “support to members of the Armed Forces” will also continue to be paid. It remains unclear who will fall under those definitions; that will be determined by Secretary of Defense Chuck Nagel (Nagel is currently in South Korea) and Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Rand Beers (in the case of the Coast Guard).
Rep. Coffman, a former Marine Corps and Army veteran who served in Iraq, said about the bill:
I fully understand the stresses that our men and women in uniform face on a day-to-day basis, particularly when we are still a nation at war. When things do not go well at home, the stress that our deployed men and women are already under is multiplied, particularly if their families go without an income and suffer financial hardships due to a government shutdown.
In other words, don’t make a bad situation worse. The men and women of our military have bigger things to worry about – like keeping us safe.
Thankfully, on this one point, Congress finally listened.
