Showing posts with label Capitol Hill. Show all posts
Survivors Fight to End 'Widows Tax'
They are always warmly received, but that's where the hospitality ends. Despite pledges of help from scores of federal officials - including President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi - their long quest remains unfulfilled.
Every year since 2005, the Senate has voted to eliminate the policy that denies widows the ability to collect both a military survivor's benefit and the full annuity bought when their military husbands were alive. But in each of those years, the fix was dropped when House and Senate negotiators wrote the final bill in private.
"What we always hear is that there is just no funding for us. 'Sorry, this is not your year,'" said Vivianne Wersel, chairwoman of the Government Relations Committee at Gold Star Wives of America. Her husband died of a heart attack in 2005, days after returning from his second tour in Iraq. "What happens behind closed doors, we get thrown under the bus."
The widows' tax is a law that won't allow surviving spouses to receive the retirement pay due them when their spouse died from a cause related to military service, and at the same time collect the full annuity - essentially an insurance policy most of their spouses opted to buy. They paid an average of 6.5 percent of their retirement pay in premiums, often $100 or more a month.
Because one benefit is subtracted from the other, affected surviving spouses lose about $1,000 a month on average. There are about 54,000 survivors who are affected by the policy, whose spouses served in conflicts from World War II to Afghanistan, and that number could grow.
The widows say politicians have promised time and time again to help them, but they don't.
Part of the problem is the cost. Eliminating the offset in benefits is expensive, said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who has been the widows' longtime ally. Making good on the promise would cost $6.7 billion over a decade.
But knowing the cost hasn't stopped politicians from promising to help.
Pelosi, as House minority leader in 2005, took up the widows' cause as part of the Democrats' GI Bill of Rights, before her party gained control of Congress.
Two years later, Obama, then a senator, co-sponsored legislation to eliminate the offset just before he spoke at a Gold Star Wives reception on Capitol Hill. In his budget proposal to the Congress last week, he didn't include it.
Kimberly Hazelgrove, 36, of Lorton, Va., whose husband died in Iraq in 2004, said she recalls Obama coming to the reception and promising to help them. The 36-year-old mother of two said she's now left wondering what happened to the promise.
"I have yet to see it, after a year in office, that really being a priority for them," said Hazelgrove, who has lobbied on Capitol Hill with her kids, ages 6 and 9, in tow.
Last June, four military widows showed up before 8 a.m. for a House Armed Services Committee session where their issue was on the agenda. Several hours into the hearing, an aide told them the discussion had been pushed back because of its sensitive nature.
At 10:30 p.m., the matter finally came to a vote. By then, Sandra Drew of Herndon, Va., was the only widow still there. Drew, whose husband was killed in Bosnia in 1995, said she was dumbfounded when Democrats who had co-sponsored the legislation in past years voted against it, while Republicans who had once opposed it were supporting it.
She said some committee members sheepishly looked at her as they voted down the provision, "visibly uncomfortable that I was in the room. It went right down party lines, and it shouldn't be a partisan issue."
Steve Strobridge, a retired Air Force colonel who is director of government relations at the Military Officers Association of America, said something could be done for the widows if the political will existed.
"It requires a vote of the entire Congress or a big emphasis of leadership to say we're going to elevate this priority, and as terrible as it seems, taking care of the widows whose military sponsor was killed by service has not been given a high enough priority," he said.
Congress did take the step of recognizing the widows' plight and gave affected survivors $50 more per month starting in 2008.
"We've had a partial victory and eventually we will continue to pound away and get it done," Nelson said.
Wersel said her group is pleased that so far this year they have enlisted more than 300 co-sponsors for their legislation in the House and more than 50 in the Senate, but they are still not confident that means Congress will pass it.
"The whole process has become rhetoric," she said.
McHugh Prioritizes Support, Outreach
McHugh, who took office Sept. 21, spoke to more than 400 members of the Army staff and secretariat in the Pentagon auditorium at an Army Leader Forum.
He expressed his admiration for those who serve, stating, "The most important thing we do is take care of our Soldiers and take care of our families." There is a "critical interdependence" between Soldiers and families in relation to readiness, he said, especially with an all-volunteer force.
Continuing to improve the availability and excellence of quality-of-life programs is essential after almost nine years of war, even as funding may decrease in coming years, he said, adding this imperative must be balanced with vital efforts to modernize the force.
Facing persistent conflict, he said the Army must transform the way it develops its leaders to prepare them for "hybrid threats" and ambiguous situations. He said the Army must train its leaders to be comfortable in dealing with uncertainty by teaching them "how to think" as well as a doctrinal baseline of "what to think."
"Technology does not in and of itself lift the fog of war," McHugh said. He said leaders need to be comfortable with greater decentralized authority from the troop level to the institutional level in order to encourage bottom-up solutions. Of course, he said the Army must also ensure that robust service-wide standards are in place.
"In too many instances, the so-called traditional acquisition process has not been as agile, flexible and efficient as the force it's charged to support," McHugh said.
He lauded initiatives such as the Rapid Equipping Force and Experimental Task Force, saying the Army must continue efforts to get emerging technologies into the hands of Soldiers quickly. "It's a work in progress," he said, but there's more to be done.
"We have to re-tool our entire existing acquisition processes and develop a more agile acquisition strategy that directly supports the warfighter on the battlefield today, next year and beyond," McHugh said. "And do it in a way that meets the expectations of our overseers on Capitol Hill."
In addition, the Army needs a more robust and effective partnership with Congress, McHugh said. He praised the Congressional Fellowship Program, saying the program is larger now than ever with 26 fellows from the Army on Capitol Hill, and added that the program should continue to grow.
McHugh challenged every Army general officer in the National Capitol Region to take a "direct, personal role" in fostering a relationship with Congress by making "a concerted effort to specifically partner with a member in office on Capitol Hill."
From his perspective of having served 17 years in the House of Representatives, he said the Army must do a better job of explaining needs and reporting achievements because this relationship with Congress is crucial to success in obtaining needed resources.
The secretary concluded his formal comments by thanking the staff and secretariat. He cited his trip last month to Iraq and Afghanistan, saying that warfighters there know they are making a difference.
"You're doing vital work, supporting our troops and making a difference in the lives of millions of people, who like you wake up but who have a different dream - a dream that someday maybe they can enjoy the freedoms, the liberties that this United States Army has given to hundreds of millions across the planet since its inception."
McHugh took questions from audience members, including one who asked whether the number of civilian employees working for the Army would grow beyond the current force in light of President Obama's initiative to replace contractors with government employees when appropriate. The secretary said outsourcing would be examined on a case-by-case basis, and where there was not an essential government responsibility to keep a function in-house, who could do the job most efficiently would be weighed.
"I think our first responsibility has to be to the taxpayer dollar," he said, adding that a "robust interaction" between the public and private sectors will not only stimulate the economy, but provide an Army outreach into communities.
