Braxton Taylor
Marine Corps leaders said they have cleared backlogs of delayed duty station moves and are working to widdle down delayed bonus payouts they said were caused by Capitol Hill’s late budgets.
In December, Military.com reported that nearly 1,000 Marines were at risk of losing out on bonuses the service had promised them upon reenlistment, and roughly 3,000 Marines could not move on time to their next installation because the Corps had to rely on funding from the previous year’s budget cycle, due to a stopgap solution from Congress known as a continuing resolution, or CR.
Now, service officials said they currently have not had to delay any duty station moves, and that there are about 500 Marines “who we would love to pay this year, but we just can’t,” Lt. Gen. James Adams III, the deputy commandant for programs and resources, said on Tuesday. Service officials remain wary of the short-term funding solutions offered by Congress after having to modify essential processes to make do.
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The best thing to avoid these issues moving forward is “predictable, on-time and sufficient funding,” Adams said, something that none of the services has had from Congress for years. That has led to a bevy of issues that leaders such as Adams; the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Eric Smith; and other service-branch leaders have continually beat the drum on.
In March, Congress passed a CR that goes through the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, marking the first time the Pentagon will have to operate on stopgap spending for the entire year. While lawmakers added some extra funding to cover a pay raise for troops, military officials had warned lawmakers that the money would not be enough to prevent harmful fallout from a full-year CR.
To contend with the lack of bonus payouts and duty station move backlogs, the service has had to use unconventional work-arounds to fulfill the requirements of their personnel budget, a pot of money that represents the lion’s share of the Corps’ spending on items such as food, housing and paychecks.
Still, the service is short about $60 million in its personnel budget, Adams said.
In December, Military.com reported the Marine Corps began issuing move orders without an initial “line of accounting” attached to them, meaning that troops could use the orders to begin setting up necessities such as housing and family care at their next duty station but could not actually execute the move.
Then, when Marines are roughly four months from their move, Maj. Gen. Ryan Rideout, the director of the service’s Manpower Management division, said on Tuesday, a line of accounting is attached to the order so they can pay for movers, gas and other travel necessities.
This way, the Marine Corps doesn’t have to “have that expense sitting out there being unused for say, a year,” Rideout said, adding that by creating the orders, budget officials are then able to forecast how much they’re going to have to spend without actually spending it yet.
Meanwhile, in an earlier panel, Adams said President Donald Trump’s administration and the Marine Corps were eyeing extending times between duty station moves in an effort to inject more stability into Marines’ lives.
“If you’re in some place that you love, staying there for a long time is great,” Rideout said about the possibility. But alluding to “burden sharing” across the Marine Corps and contending with billets that need to be regularly filled, he added that “if you’re in some place that you’re not loving, staying there a long time is not great.”
For bonuses, the Marine Corps offers an annual slew of monetary incentives to keep Marines in the force and to prioritize critical jobs such as cybersecurity and intelligence. This year, leaders created what Rideout referred to as an “out clause.”
The Corps will still offer a Marine with a reenlistment contract a bonus, but if the service cannot pay that bonus within the fiscal year, the service member elected to re-up in, they have 90 days to separate from the service.
“They can actually get out of it,” Rideout said. “We don’t ever expect that that’s going to be executed, because we think we’ll get the money on that time period.”
Rebecca Kheel contributed to this report.
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