The Association of the U.S. Army and Operation Deploy Your Dress have teamed up again for the fourth annual Operation Deploy Your Dress D.C. pop-up event.
For the first time, every active-duty military spouse will have the opportunity to give feedback to military leaders through the 2021 Active Duty Spouse Survey.
While some spouses will still be randomly selected for the scientifically sampled survey, DoD is now offering all active-duty spouses the opportunity to provide feedback on the most pressing military life issues, the Pentagon said in its announcement.
Registration is now open for the fifth annual Virtual Military Spouse Symposium, which aims to connect military spouses to a professional community, resources and skills for career development.
The event, hosted by the DoD Spouse Education and Career Opportunities program, will take place April 27–29. This year’s theme is “Reflect, Explore, Act,” and there will be two days of online sessions dedicated to career development and a third day focused on relationships and work-life balance.
Military spouses continue to face challenges finding and maintaining employment, an issue that can impact military families’ wellbeing and whether a service member chooses to stay in uniform, a new Government Accountability Office report says.
Many of the challenges stem from an inability to easily transfer professional licenses or credentials from one state to another, and frequent moves, which may be connected to higher unemployment rates among military spouses compared to civilians, according to the GAO.
A new report looking at the 25% unemployment rate for military spouses finds that little real progress has been made in reforms that would reduce joblessness and help family finances.
A 2021 report on employment stability prepared for the National Military Spouse Network, a 10-year-old effort focused on helping military spouses have professional careers, says the U.S. unemployment rate peaked at 14.7% in April 2020—still 10 percentage points less than the “stubbornly high rate” for the wives and husbands of service members.
The latest DoD survey of military spouses showed improvements in areas such as personal health and financial stability, but family members also continued to grapple with increased stress from deployments, spouse employment and other issues.
The Survey of Active-Duty Spouses is conducted every two years, and the results help military leaders identify problems and refine or adjust policies and programs for families.
Ambitious initiatives to improve quality of life are being planned for soldiers and Army families, including almost $12 billion for housing and barracks improvements.
This is an effort to put momentum behind the Army’s people priorities, which also extend to Army civilians.
Surviving spouses eligible for both military and veterans’ survivor benefits will see increases beginning with their Feb. 1 annuity payments.
This is happening because of a provision in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act that temporarily reduces a dollar-for-dollar offset of benefits for survivors receiving both DoD military survivor benefits and Veterans Affairs Department dependency and indemnity compensation.
An Army survey aimed at finding more and better ways to improve military spouse employment opportunities is being launched Oct. 14 and will seek feedback from Army civilians who are spouses of military members.
The focus of the Army Civilian Military Spouse Employment Survey is to get Army civilians whose spouses are members of the military “to share their insights and experiences regarding how they gained and maintain employment in the Army,” said Karen Wolfe, chief of the staffing and classification division in the office of the deputy Army chief of staff for personnel.
The Association of the U.S. Army is supporting legislation that would help spouses of active-duty troops save for retirement.
Introduced in both the House and the Senate, the Military Spouses Retirement Security Act would expand spouses’ access to retirement plans sponsored by their employers.
Under provisions outlined in the bill, small businesses—for example those with 100 or fewer employees—would be eligible for a tax credit of up to $500 a year for up to three years for every military spouse employee.
