How Congress forged bipartisan solution to help military families
The stress of spreading roots only to be transferred a few months later can make it challenging for military spouses to maintain their own careers.
The recent rapid deployment of U.S. forces to the Middle East was a sudden reminder of the sacrifices made by our men and women in uniform and their families. New orders forced many of these service members to unexpectedly part from their loved ones, just days after the holiday season.
That they answered the call of duty is no surprise. Americans can all agree that our military families make enormous sacrifices on behalf of our country.
Both in times of conflict and in times of peace, it is often the spouses of service members who lead the mission of managing the home front. This is no easy task. After all, life in a military family is life on the move.
Many spouses shoulder the burden of settling into a new community — moving into a new home, finding new doctors and enrolling children in new schools. It is a time consuming and exhausting process, often repeated numerous times throughout service members’ careers.
The stress of spreading roots only to be transferred a few months or years later can make it challenging for military spouses to maintain their own careers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate among military spouses is a staggering 24 percent.
Spouses face obstacles in careers
Of those spouses who do manage to maintain professional careers, nearly three in four work in fields like health care or education that often require a state license. Re-licensing time and time again is not only costly, it also forces spouses to devote hours to filling out paperwork and often leads to long delays between settling into a new home and starting work. The same is true of spouses who own small businesses, which must be re-registered in each new state.
All of this red tape hurts both our military families and the readiness of our Armed Forces, with service members’ desire to pursue a long-term career in the military often blunted by financial and familial realities.
We began working together to address this bureaucratic problem in 2018, when Andrea and her husband, Navy Commander Matthew Krull, visited Sen. Shaheen’s Washington, D.C., office. Andrea raised the struggles military spouses face as they move from state to state and the challenges she has confronted re-registering her small business each time her husband is reassigned to a new military installation.
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After hearing about Andrea’s experience, Sen. Shaheen teamed up with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, to develop bipartisan legislation that would cut through this red tape. The bill allows spouses to register businesses in one place and makes it easier to transfer occupational licenses from state to state. This both enables spouses to begin work soon after they move to a new community and helps the Armed Forces to retain skilled soldiers, sailors, aviators and Marines.
In May, the Portable Certification of Spouses Act was introduced with the support of Second Lady Karen Pence. Sen. Shaheen and Sen. Cotton then worked to include this bipartisan, commonsense fix in the annual defense bill, which was signed into law shortly before the new year.
Defense bill eased strain on families
The defense bill also featured a number of additional bipartisan provisions to make things easier for military families. It included a measure to expand tuition assistance for some spouses pursuing an education and phases out the unfair “Widow’s Tax,” which unjustly reduces benefits for as many as 65,000 people who have lost a husband or wife in uniform. These are important changes and they will have a direct effect on the well-being of military families across the country.
This bipartisan bill becoming law shows that there is common ground in Congress to address the challenges faced by our service members, their spouses and families. Congress should continue to build on this progress. When the opportunity to make things a little easier for military families presents itself, we need to seize it and move forward with the same sense of duty that they embody every day.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-New Hampshire, is a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Andrea Krull is a public relations consultant and small business owner, and the wife of a Navy Commander from Manchester, New Hampshire.
