Besa Pinchotti, CEO of the NMFA, said her organization has been pushing these priorities for years, and she is urging Congress to include the provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
“It’s important to get everything. And even if everything is included, it’s not going to solve all of the problems,” she said. “But this will make a huge dent [in the issues] that military families need [addressed].”
Pinchotti worked closely with the bipartisan congressional House Quality of Life Panel, which included many of the requests of NMFA in the House version of the NDAA passed earlier this year, after forming in 2023 to study standard of living issues with servicemembers.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), chairman of the panel, sent a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee last month urging them to include the quality of life provisions in the NDAA.
“Too many of our servicemembers and miliary families are struggling and it’s not right,” Bacon said in a November statement.
House and Senate lawmakers must conference and merge their versions of the NDAA before each legislative chamber passes the bill and sends it to the president’s desk.
The quality of life measures include a roughly 20 percent pay raise for junior enlisted members, boosts to home maintenance accounts and increasing oversight of military housing, a longstanding issue.
The House NDAA also increases a basic needs allowance to 200 percent of the federal poverty guidelines, addresses child care staffing shortages at DoD facilities and fully funds child care fee assistance programs.
All of this is vital for NMFA, the group says.
“This is really going to be a perpetual problem if we don’t take care of our current military families, because those are also, in many cases, the families who will be serving in the future,” said Pinchotti.
Another key provision for NMFA in both the House and Senate defense bills concerns IVF, though it’s uncertain if lawmakers will support it all the way to the finish line.
The draft bills expand the military’s health care service TRICARE to cover IVF, giving servicemembers access to the fertility treatment at the same coverage level as other federal employees.
Pinchotti added she remains optimistic about the provisions she has long fought for that matter deeply to the military community, though budgeting concerns have historically been a constraint.
“The strength of our military comes from the families,” she said. “When you’re hearing that your military families, the people who are raising their hands for our country every day, can’t get food on the table … don’t have access to the health care that they need, don’t have their housing covered fully — and this is the benefit that was promised to them — I don’t see how you could decide any other way but to support these provisions.”
