Starting this week, a long-simmering fight over pay and benefits for U.S. military personnel will boil over. And it could stay hot for years.
Congress commissioned a panel of mostly former lawmakers and flag officers two years ago and charged it with bringing pay, pensions, healthcare and other perks up to date for Americans in uniform. Sounds tame enough, right?
But when the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission unveils its recommendations on Thursday, and hearings follow in February, the battle will be on. That’s because military pay and benefits are to defense policy-making what Social Security and Medicare are to U.S. politics generally: a third rail.
Asked which possible proposals would engender the most opposition on Capitol Hill, the chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel, Nevada Republican Joe Heck, said: “All of them.”
Sweeping Writ
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The panel’s reach could be deep. The law that created the commission says it can’t recommend retirement changes for those now in the Armed Forces or current retirees. But it can rewrite the retirement rules for the next recruits. And it can make proposals on pay, housing, health care, commissary subsidies and a host of other issues affecting the financial status of past, current and future troops.
Heck said, for example, that the panel is expected to propose revising the retirement pay system. Service members now can only draw a pension after at least 20 years. The panel may recommend something more akin to a private 401(k), insiders say, though details are scarce.
Heck said it will be especially difficult for Congress to clear legislation “that’s going to affect somebody who’s already serving in uniform. That will be a very heavy lift to get done.”
Changes to the benefits of future generations will be easier for Congress to swallow. But that doesn’t mean powerful military family groups won’t fight to stop ideas that would hurt future soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. If those groups oppose the commission’s proposals, it’ll be hard to enact them.
When the Pentagon wants to cut a ship program’s budget, for example, shipbuilding states’ delegations swing into defensive maneuvers. But when the department proposes scaling back military pay or benefits, every congressional district and state is affected and everyone’s representatives has something to say about it.
Against that resistance are the soaring personnel costs since Sept. 11, 2001. The department has sought to curb the growth, but Congress has rejected most curbs and projections still show a problem.
If the cost per service member keeps growing at the rate of the past 15 years and the department budget grows with inflation, by about 2039 the entire budget would be needed to cover pay and benefits for the military force of 2012, said Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The 2012 military force had 1.4 million on active duty and 800,000 in the Guard and Reserve.
Spending on healthcare and pensions for retirees alone will cost more in fiscal 2016 than will the entire account for military personnel who currently serve, says Arnold L. Punaro, a consultant who advises the Pentagon.
Congress has shot down Pentagon proposals to trim those costs, such as by raising deductibles and co-pays for service members and retirees’ healthcare or cutting housing benefits. Lawmakers have even deep-sixed attempts to get the wealthiest military retirees, many of whom receive both private-sector salaries and military pensions, to pay a little more for their military healthcare.
But to advocates for military families, the benefits were promised and they don’t want to see that commitment shrink now.
“We’re going to try to communicate to Congress the contract that’s been established and what’s important to sustain the all volunteer force,” says Mike Hayden, director of government relations at the Military Officers Association of America.
Military families dramatically showed their power in December 2013, when Congress cleared a budget deal that included a mere 1 percent reduction in the cost of living raises for military retirees of working age. The ink was barely dry when Congress, after being hit by a political backlash, repealed the new law in one of the next session’s first acts/.../