She had a great federal job—with the Defense Department, for which she’s worked for more than 20 years—when her husband got orders to Hawaii. She found another suitable DOD job right away, though she took a pay cut. A few years later, when her husband got orders back to the mainland, she asked her boss whether they wanted to keep her, working remotely, just until they found someone new.
Months later, she’s still working remotely in the old job. So when President Trump on Jan. 20 signed a two-sentence presidential action memo ordering federal agencies to “terminate remote work arrangements,” she panicked.
“I immediately thought, ‘I’m gonna get fired, right? Immediately.’ And I found it difficult to focus on my work,” said the spouse, who asked not to be identified out of fear of retribution. “I just wasn’t sure what to do…and I felt like I had let my co-workers down, because if I got fired and they weren’t able to replace me, then that puts more burden on my coworkers in the long run. So it was frustrating, especially because I moved to support my spouse.”
She wasn’t alone. More than 2,000 people have signed an online petition urging Trump and Congress to “enact protections for remote work opportunities for military spouses.” Five hundred contacted their member of Congress at the urging of Military Officers Association of America. And more than 5,000 members of a Facebook group for military spouses who work for the government have asked admins for help keeping their jobs.
Guidance released after the initial presidential memo has allowed for some military spouses—including the spouse mentioned above—to seek and receive exceptions. But many families made irreversible decisions before the guidance emerged—and advocates say troops’ spouses need a blanket exemption.
Reps. Rob Wittman, R-Va., and Eugene Vindman, D-Va., last week introduced legislation to exempt military spouses from the return-to-work mandate.
“Our military families make great sacrifices in support of their loved ones in the Armed Forces—for which we are forever grateful for—and should not come at the expense of employability, financial stability, or personal fulfillment,” Wittman said in a statement, adding that one of his constituents told his office that her family relies on dual incomes, and “remote work has made it possible for her to maintain her federal career despite the frequent relocations that come with military life.”
This proposal recognizes a reality many military spouses—including me—understand. Whether they decline good jobs that don’t have remote options, choose a lower-paying job because of the flexibility it offers, or stress about how to answer the inevitable questions from potential employers about a resume filled with a random assortment of two- and three-year positions in out-of-the-way towns, maintaining a career while married to an active-duty member of the military is not easy.
Jennifer Goodale, director of military family and survivor policy for MOAA and herself a military spouse, knows all about these challenges. The unemployment rate for military spouses has stayed at 20 percent or higher for more than a decade, she said, which is why “three separate executive orders have highlighted the importance of providing military dependents with meaningful employment opportunities, especially in federal service.
“It is imperative that we recognize the work that has been done to alleviate military spouse employment challenges and don’t fall two steps back” just because the federal Office of Personnel Management and the White House’s Officer of Management and the Budget unintentionally “fail to acknowledge that exceptions to policy must be made for military spouses to keep a career on the move,” she said.
Advocacy organization Blue Star Families on Feb. 4 released its annual survey of military families. The survey found that 71 percent of spouses of active-duty service members work, though the unemployment rate is much higher for those who live outside the continental United States. And 29 percent of active-duty spouse respondents said the top reason their service member would leave the military is “civilian spouse encountered too many employment challenges.”
Researchers at Deloitte Insights, writing in 2020, found that “well over half” of military spouses live in areas with below-average job availability, and that many of the largest military bases are in areas with negative job availability—fewer jobs than there are job seekers. It’s a problem I’ve encountered both in the United States and abroad.
The defense secretary’s office declined to comment for this story. But a Jan. 31 memo to senior Pentagon leaders states that “employees who are approved for remote work for purposes of enabling them to accompany a Service member spouse to an assignment that is not in the vicinity of the Agency worksite” are exempt from the return-to-work order, but notes that exemptions for telework or remote work that are not specified in the memo must be approved by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Guidance issued by other agencies, including the Veterans Administration, also allow exemptions for military spouses with permanent-change-of-station orders.
But Goodale said MOAA would like to see guidance from the Office of Personnel Management, because some of the existing guidance is unclear, and different agencies have different policies.
Maria Donnelly, a military spouse and advocate for military families, said the problems go beyond permanent-change-of-station moves—from spouses applying specifically for jobs because they were remote, to being required by the military to live far from their agency, to needing a telework-friendly job because of a spouse’s frequent deployments.
“Military spouses, unlike civilians, do not have the choice, in many cases, to just live closer to where they would work. We cannot just pick up and move, and when we PCS, we do not choose when we move,” she said, adding: “The military moves us away from our villages and our support systems and from fall back options that might be available to others, and so it restricts a lot of our choices.”
Donnelly, who previously worked for the government but now works remotely for a civilian nonprofit, said that if she was not able to work remotely, her husband would not have stayed in the military.
“I don’t think we could have afforded to,” she said. “People assume that the pension’s enough, but one year of me not working is equivalent to three years of his pension,” even though she took a significant pay cut for her current position because of the flexibility it provides.
“The military does not really pay enough to make ends meet for a lot of families, and so just like everyone else in America, we have to have two incomes to make ends meet. … That’s just a fact of life, and in a lot of cases, military spouses might be the primary breadwinners. And so, when you affect a military spouse’s income, you affect the entire military family’s financial well-being, financial stability, and you end up pushing military members out. And you’re not going to push out the people who kind of have no other choice. You’re going to push out your highest performers, who are likely married to other people who are highly motivated individuals.”
Another military spouse who works for the Defense Department and asked not to be named for fear of reprisal said she applied for and got her remote job when she was living in a different state than the office is located in. She has moved twice since then, and now lives in the same state as her home office—but still several hours’ drive away, in a town with few DOD facilities nearby.
“My spouse has raised his hand for a series of tours that others didn’t want, because of the flexibility of my career,” she said. And when the presidential action memo first came out, before she was granted an exemption, she and her husband discussed the possibility of her “geo-baching,” an abbreviation for the term geographic bachelor, which the military uses for service members who move to a duty station by themselves, leaving their family elsewhere. In this case, the federal worker’s husband would have stayed in his duty station with their children while she commuted back and forth on the weekends.
The offer of deferred resignation, coupled with news of a hiring freeze, caused even more stress for many other military spouses, she said. “We are already hearing about military spouses taking this officer, and we don’t know the unintended consequences. Many of them are looking at it through the lens of, I’m PCSing, I don’t know if I will be able to take my job with me and be a remote employee, I don’t know if I’ll be able to even transfer. I may not even be able to get another job.”
The DOD later clarified that all of its civilian positions are exempt from the hiring freeze, but that came too late for some spouses, she said. “People are making decisions now, and it takes so long for them to get these exemptions out, [and] even as they get them out, they’re imperfect. … The damage is already done. There are already too many straws that break the camel’s back.”
Editor’s note: After this story was published, the Office of Personnel Management issued guidance exempting spouses of active-duty service members, as well as spouses of members of the U.S. Foreign Service serving overseas, from the return-to-office directive.
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