Jennifer Barnhill is a columnist for Military.com writing about military families.
Military spouse unemployment has been around 20% for half a century. In recent years opportunities such as telework have provided a solution to the high mobility of military life, allowing spouses to retain their jobs through military moves. However, the recent return-to-work order issued by the Trump administration has military spouses, who can’t show up to work, wondering whether they still have jobs.
On Jan. 20, the Trump administration issued an executive order canceling remote federal employment, mandating employees to return to the office. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued a direction to federal agencies requiring them to come up with a plan to implement the order, allowing some agency flexibility. In its first memo, OPM did not include military spouses as an exempt group.
While researching this article, I spoke with a dozen spouses about the impact this executive order has already had on their families.
Guidance has trickled out to employees in a piecemeal fashion. Spouses shared individual agency memos from Health and Human Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), memos that named military spouses as exempt from this order. According to a DoD memo dated Jan. 24 reviewed by Military.com, the DoD did not explicitly indicate that military spouses were exempt from this change. Instead, it deferred to the service branches to make that call.
However, OPM — in collaboration with the Office of Management and Budget (OBM) — released a follow-up memo on Jan. 27, stating: “Agencies should also exclude military spouses working remotely.” The DoD later revised its memo on Jan. 31 to reflect this change, which is due in large part to military spouses working behind the scenes to remind leaders of existing protections. But military spouse teleworkers are unsure whether this applies to them.
While both remote work and telework offer similar flexibilities to military spouses, they are different. Remote work is a job that is established as a position that does not need to report to a central office. Telework is an agreement between an employee and an agency that allows them to take what was originally an in-person job and work from home. But these definitions have been called into question in recent weeks.
Katie, who asked that she only be identified by her first name because she worried about how speaking out will impact her employment, started working in federal service three years ago. Two years into her time in her job, her supervisor left his position. As military spouses do, Katie advocated for herself and pitched the idea of her moving up into his position. This required her to also negotiate a telework position. She did what she was supposed to do: She found a way to move up in her career while moving with the military. It is unclear if the “remote” military spouse exemption applies to her because her job isn’t remote. She’s a permanent teleworker.
“There’s a lot of misunderstanding right now, and a lot of misconceptions,” Maria Donnelly, a military family advocate, said. “Military spouses oftentimes have no choice but to work for the federal government, because bases are in places where the military or the government is the only game in town.”
Donnelly left her federal career to work for a civilian employer who guaranteed her remote employment. She said remote work was the only way she could be employed and get to live in the same location as her spouse. She has since dedicated herself to helping military spouses navigate the ups and downs of federal employment.
Given this shake-up, this advocacy is needed all the more. Politicians on both sides of the aisle, along with DoD and civilian leaders, have previously branded the federal government as the “employer of choice” for military spouses, publicly acknowledging the relationship between employing military spouses and military readiness. But let’s get something straight: This relationship is no handout. Military spouses are a highly educated addition to the federal workforce, an addition that strengthens the financial readiness of the force.
Since the release of the return-to-office order, Donnelly has heard from countless spouses who are not only worried about their jobs, they are also concerned about the impact that the policy would have on their family’s decision to remain in service.
“I’ve had multiple spouses call me crying, convinced they’re about to lose their jobs,” Donnelly said. “The misconception is that military families can survive on one income, but we can’t. It’s becoming too expensive to serve.”
We are living in a two-income economy. Everyone, including the government, is looking for ways to save money and be more efficient. This is why the omission of military spouses as an exception in both teleworking and remote roles is especially confusing. It is far cheaper to promote flexible work options for military spouses than it is to pay service members more.
“There were remote positions well before the pandemic,” said Mika Cross, a government workplace expert who has testified before Congress on the importance of telework in maintaining a competitive federal workforce. “Those people were accurately coded and paid appropriately in remote roles, which were designed to be permanently off-site — never requiring a government office to work in by leveraging technology to maintain productivity and connectivity.”
Cross said the order was confusing because it only highlighted “remote” work and not telework, and most people use the terms interchangeably, but they are different.
Instead of eliminating career options for military spouses, we should be focusing on ways to codify protections, so military spouses are not forced to remind the government of their existence every time there is a change in administration.
“In all the political churn and in all of the unintended consequences, you have military families suffering,” Donnelly said. “We know that that’s not the intent. We’re just collateral damage.”
Military families are left to fight to be remembered.
“If READINESS had passed last year, none of this would be an issue,” Donnelly added.
The Resilient Employment and Authorization Determination to Increase National Employment of
Serving Spouses Act (READINESS) was a bipartisan bill that would have created federal remote and telework protections for military spouses.
“It feels like the policies were written haphazardly, not to get us back to work but to force us out,” said a Marine Corps spouse who works for a federal agency and asked for anonymity for fear of losing her job if she shared her concerns. She described the chilling effect the policy has already had on the community. “It’s devastating and feels like a betrayal of everything we sacrifice daily.”
One military spouse and a Navy veteran shared her family’s story of upheaval.
“We’re keeping our house, and I’m staying behind with the kids while he moves ahead,” she said. Her spouse recently received permanent change-of-station, or PCS, orders, but due to this return-to-work directive, she was planning to live geographically separated because they could not afford for her to lose her job.
“The uncertainty is unbearable, and we can’t afford to move twice if I’m ordered to return to the office,” she said.
While some military spouse “remote” workers are theoretically “safe” from this return-to-work policy update, teleworkers are not, nor are veteran and foreign service officer spouses. And, let’s be honest, nor are our civilian counterparts who serve the military community.