Further, nurses may face a future downgrade in salary if DHA can’t find a way to secure special pay authorities via other means, according to union stewards and current nurses interviewed by Federal Times.

In 2022, the Defense Civilian Personnel Advisory Service issued a decision following a classification appeal submitted previously by Navy nurses who sought to have their positions certified as GS-13s.

As justification, they recalled examples of other federal nurses who were doing similar work for more pay. Seeking parity, they reasoned that their compensation should be commensurate, especially given burnout fueled by steep vacancy rates at some military medical centers.

DCPAS found that those positions should be held at the GS-12 level, and it triggered a desk audit of other nurses who fell into this category. At the time, the result was that 605 nonsupervisory, advanced practice nurses in the 0610 occupational series were subject to a downgrade to a GS-12, according to a fact sheet disseminated by DHA and obtained by Federal Times.

However, the agency recently informed employees that it’s suspending any regrades of all impacted GS-13 non-supervisory nurses. But, it has ceased recruiting any new nurses at a GS-13 level. In the meantime, DHA is looking at other hiring and compensation authorities to help minimize the negative impact the ordered pay cut would have had on hiring and retention.

Peter Graves, a DHA spokesperson, said the agency is conducting a series of town halls this month, though most of the nursing workforce was notified of the changes in June.

“DHA made this decision to suspend based upon its plans to pursue application of Title 38 authorities,” reads the fact sheet from May, authored by Alicia English, director of administration and management. “DHA leaders are very concerned the military medical treatment facilities are losing qualified staff to the Department of Veterans Affairs and the private sector in many markets due to the limitations on hiring and pay under the agency’s current Title 5.”

Cathie McQuiston, deputy general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents DHA and VA staff, said she questions DHA’s ability to recruit nurses at the lower grade, especially as they may work alongside nurses still at the GS-13 level.

In an interview, McQuiston also said the Defense Department already has Title 38 authority from Congress, so it’s unclear why this wasn’t leveraged earlier.

In a nutshell, Title 38 and Title 5 are two categories of federal employment that set rules around appointments, promotions, qualifications, work schedules and pay. Title 38 is used by the VA, where nurses can benefit from different pay scales and performance-based increases that reflect their skill or the demand. Title 5 is the competitive service and governs those under the General Schedule and Wage Grade pay plans.

According to DHA, use of Title 38 compensation authorities covers roughly two-thirds of military health system workers in 28 occupations.

“It’s unclear what this working group is doing when they already have the authority they say they want,” McQuiston said in an interview.

English’s fact sheet says the agency is “analyzing the risks, impacts to budget, and differences between the competitive and excepted services, as well as engaging with the union, before deciding to implement Title 38.”

According to internal documents obtained by Federal Times, if a Title 38 conversion fails, the need to regrade positions will be reassessed. If it is successful, the conversion would be phased in, prioritizing registered nurses and licensed practical nurses first.

Pay isn’t the only issue, however.

One nurse, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the situation, said even if Title 38 is fully implemented, it would not address the need to modernize position descriptions of advanced practice nurses. She said that at present, they do not reflect the breadth of education and experience of the nurses holding these titles.

Officials have said there is an ongoing effort to standardize and reduce variation in position descriptions across the agency. In 2022, at the direction of Congress, DHA merged military medical centers from the Army, Navy, and Air Force and took control of 700 facilities, including dental clinics, in the U.S. and overseas.

As a result, nurses from the different services now worked alongside each other under one agency, but positions descriptions for them retained uniquities from their work under the military departments. DHA said it’s working on smoothing out discrepancies.

The nurse told Federal Times that nurses under the current system top out at GS-12s. Some work in the same grade for years without the ability to promote despite gaining experience and skills.

If that remains the case, nurses will take their expertise elsewhere, the nurse said, and without a steady foundation of civilian nurses, especially at bases in remote parts of the country, the availability of care will suffer for the 9.6 million service members, retirees and family members who rely on it.

“Those of us who have elected to work predominantly with service members from all the branches, have dedicated our time and efforts in doing so, and have sacrificed the opportunities for further financial gain outside of the DHA,” said David Hodson, another nurse, to Federal Times. “However, to reduce the GS classification of 0610 from a 13 to a 12 is a slap in the face to our professional integrity.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated on July 17 to clarify what the DCPAS decision determined with regard to the classification appeal.

“I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as Acting Chief Information Officer at United States Department of Defense,” Beavers wrote in July on LinkedIn. The department’s website now lists her as acting CIO.

A spokesperson for the Pentagon did not immediately return a request for comment.

As the primary IT adviser to the defense secretary, Beavers is taking over from former CIO John Sherman, who stepped down in June to take a position outside government as dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.

Previously serving as the principal deputy CIO at the Pentagon, Beavers is well acquainted with the Defense Department’s many ongoing initiatives meant to secure the defense-industrial base, develop 5G technologies and explore artificial intelligence.

Since she came to the department, Beavers has worked on landmark endeavors like Project Herald, the Pentagon’s plan to transform digital intelligence sharing, and Fulcrum, the recently announced IT transformation strategy. The latter is where she is most focused now on building momentum, she said in her LinkedIn post.

“[That] gives you tangible steps to turn that strategic vision into an operational reality,” Beavers said at the 2024 TechNet Cyber conference in Baltimore, which took place June 25-27. “It’ll be followed by an implementation plan, which will give some more information.”

The former Air Force intelligence officer and retired brigadier general comes to the position at a time when the DOD is beginning to put many of its theories around zero trust, cloud computing, machine learning and cybersecurity into practice.

The department for several years now released guidance thanks to the help of working groups and testing approaches via pilots. Now, officials say, it’s in a position to actually phase in solutions. The department has a goal to come up with a data tagging and labeling strategy by the end of the calendar year.

Beavers also said at TechNet Cyber that she anticipates growth in the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability procurement vehicle as other contracts begin to expire.

At the same time, challenges persist for Beavers and her office, including cyber workforce shortages, unpredictable funding and technical debt that separates the services from the modern approaches they’re after.

All the while, China looms as a major U.S. adversary on the digital battlefield, and attacks on public infrastructure underscore the urgency of predicting and intercepting cyberthreats.

The DOD is seeking $14.5 billion in fiscal 2025 for its cyberspace programs. According to the DOD’s website, Kevin Mulvihill is the new acting principal deputy CIO.

A spokesperson for Social Security said in a statement to Federal Times on Tuesday that after a broad sweep of water fixtures, some came back with elevated levels, which is not unusual given testing experts have told the General Services Administration that roughly half of the water samples they take come back positive.

Upon retesting, only “a small subset” of water sources in the main campus building indicated elevated levels, according to the official. Impacted fixtures have been removed, and the spokesman said employees have been notified. Officials also said they’ve flushed the system, which helps disrupt any film that have developed over water sources and stops the growth of any naturally present Legionella.

Legionella is a naturally occuring bacteria that is found in both freshwater and in plumbing, and it poses little risk when present in low numbers. It’s when the bacteria grows and is inhaled, or much less commonly drunk, that it can cause health issues, including a potentially fatal pneumonia-like sickness.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say most healthy people exposed to Legionella don’t fall ill. Still, Legionnaires’ disease, caused by the similarly named bacteria, is the most commonly reported waterborne illness in the U.S., affecting between 52,000 and 70,000 people each year.

“According to the CDC, Legionnaires’ disease and Pontiac fever — which is related [to Legionella] — remain rare, but the number of cases reported has grown over the past 20 years,” according to a blog post from GSA. “This year we are testing for Legionella, as well as things like heavy metals, across many buildings.”

Last year, GSA sent out a memo to agencies urging swift action to prevent Legionella contamination in federally owned and operating offices after it became aware of six buildings in across the country that tested positive for the bacteria. GSA said at the time that less densely populated offices post-pandemic may be contributing to water stagnation, which allows the bacteria to thrive.

Two months after those reports, GSA issued an order in November 2023 establishing national requirements and industry standards for testing the presence of Legionella, when none had existed before. This initiative likely means more positive results will be recorded simply because more tests are being conducted.

On June 13, a similar discovery was made in the water sources of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services building near Baltimore. The same bacteria, Legionella, was found when testing new plumbing fixtures, and the building was closed, according to The Washington Post.

Last summer, the Rosa Parks Federal Building in Detroit was also closed after testing exposed Legionella in the building’s cooling towers and drinking water. That building houses employees from several agencies, including the IRS and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

A new study by the nonpartisan nonprofit Partnership for Public Service identified more than 80 appointed positions spanning 15 cabinet agencies that were vacant for at least half the years between 2009 and 2023. These positions were without secretaries, chief financial officers, judicial experts and other critical leadership that require the advice and consent of the Senate via majority vote.

The report sheds more light on a well-known truth in public administration: the Senate confirmation process is often where presidential appointments go to die. Today, the process takes almost twice as long as it did during President Reagan’s term in the 1980s. The report indicates that the majority of extended vacancies are due to Senate inaction, as both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump nominated roughly the same amount of people to fill vacancies.

“The troubles faced by executive branch nominees in the Senate confirmation process have gotten worse year by year,” according to the report. “More nominees are left in limbo and those who eventually reach confirmation take longer than ever before to move through the process.”

The Senate confirmation timeline averages about 172 days under Biden and 153 days under Trump, but both presidents experienced even more extreme delays for certain choices that nearly doubled those averages. The result is career civil servants putting their lives on hold while they await judgment often fueled by politics. The agencies lack a permanent leader that is in a place of authority to lead long-term strategy.

Considering both as a case study, Biden has dealt with a narrowly divided Senate during his term which threw out objections to his nominee for the Department of Labor and boycotted votes nominees for the Federal Reserve in 2022. Another example is Rosie Hidalgo, who Biden picked to lead the Office on Violence Against Women and whose confirmation came 411 days after the Senate kicked back her name to the White House. She was eventually sworn in in 2023.

On June 13, a group of Senate Republicans led by JD Vance, Mike Lee, Bill Hagerty, Roger Marshall, Tommy Tuberville, and Eric Schmitt wrote a letter pledging their uniform opposition to a spate of Biden judicial nominees, under secretaries and commission members in protest of Trump’s recent conviction on 35 felony counts of falsifying business records.

Under Trump, the Senate successfully blocked his pick for the Federal Reserve Board after both Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee expressed concerns with her views. Of note, Trump’s pick for assistant secretary for postsecondary education at the Department of Education, Robert King, took a more than a year to be confirmed.

One solution is to reduce the number of Senate-confirmed posts in government. Considering many career executives are forced to do the work of an appointee when there is none, there is perhaps a de facto solution that could simply be made permanent.

“To address the vacancy crisis, Congress should review whether to remove the requirement of Senate confirmation for the persistently vacant positions identified in this report,” the report suggests. “While some of these roles are best performed by an appointee of the president due to their close connection to policymaking, many could be better served by the consistent leadership of a member of the Senior Executive Service.”

Airmen and guardians will soon be able to take advantage of the Hypori Halo Workspace Anywhere program that grants access to government apps, email, NIPRNet, sensitive data, and CAC-enabled websites via personal devices, including a phone or tablet, whether they’re in the office or not.

A spokesperson for Hypori did not give an exact date for enrollment, but told C4ISRNET it’s still on track to begin this summer.

“The Air Force and Space Force are actually already using our platform,” said Jared Shepard, CEO and president of Hypori, at the TechNet Cyber conference presented by the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International late last month in Baltimore. “Now, they’re going to scale.”

Capitalizing on the need for integrated communications and the pandemic-fueled remote work environment, the Army, including its Reserve and Guard components, already began transitioning service members toward Halo, which as of June 11 became the only way Army.mil users can access Army 365 services from a personal device. Shepard said at the conference that 50,000 Army enrollees are using the service since that BYOD effort began as a pilot in 2022. Hypori was also awarded a contract by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency on June 6 to give a third of its workforce remote access to secure networks.

“[BYOD] is a top priority for us, and it is a game changer because when our soldiers and airmen are not at the armory, they have to be connected in a secure way,” said Kenneth McNeill, chief information officer of the National Guard Bureau, in a statement February.

Reservists and part-time members of the services especially have limited access to base networks, so giving them the flexibility to complete work from wherever they are will be a boon to the organization, leaders have said.

“In our dynamic environment, the Department of the Air Force is committed to providing user-friendly enterprise solutions which empower the force to work securely in a wide range of operational contexts,” said Air Force Chief Information Officer Venice Goodwine in a statement in March.

The technology also eliminates the need to carry two devices while ensuring their government and personal data are kept separate to minimize liability. The idea of “no data at rest” means there is no risk of compromise if the enrolled devices are stolen or lost, and it ensures that personal information stored on that device is not accessible by the government.

The technology, which also vets users, is also compliant with White House orders that ban TikTok on government devices due to concerns that the social media platform’s Chinese-based parent company, ByteDance, would get access to sensitive data.

“Industry has a responsibility that if it’s doing work for the Department of Defense, that it protects that data,” Shepard said.

At the TechNet Cyber conference presented by the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International in Baltimore last month, Randy Resnick, director of the Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office, said tagging and labeling, the practice of assigning metadata and identifiers to pieces of data, has been a long-term challenge for the department.

“They’ve been apparently working on this for 12 or more years —15 years — and I think it’s time enough to do something,” he said.

By way of an update on these efforts, Resnick said he approved three pilot programs in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Defense Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Office and the Department of Homeland Security to develop a plan that would allow for all the necessary conversions and interpretations to process any data tagging and labeling standard in an understandable,repeatable way.

The goal is to have a successful demo of a schema by the end of the calendar year. Resnick also set a deadline of October for an internal working group to brief his office on a solution, even a partial one.

“We’re not looking for perfection,” he said at TechNet. “We have to start implementing something, and then it’ll grow over time as people agree to more tags and more labels. It’s got to be flexible enough to allow for growth.”

In a January study by Defense Innovation Board, researchers found “data access remains the central enterprise-level obstacle to the sharing and use of data for the warfighter.” Part of that is because military departments are “haphazardly” placing data leaders throughout the organization while top-level tech leaders are struggling to enforce their position as a unifier. Other persistent issues like a lack of uniform guidance, sustained funding, workforce gaps and technical silos also make progress on broader zero-trust difficult.

For now, there remain roadblocks that separate the DoD from the data economy it wants, but Resnick is realistic about these challenges and said a solution in development is better than nothing at all.

“That’s the type of solution that I personally am looking for, because that’s what the department needs,” he said.

That means he knows — more or less — what he’s got, and what he needs. And what he needs, is people.

“[In the services], we’re not having a problem recruiting cyber talent,” he said at the 2024 TechNet Cyber conference presented by the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International in Baltimore. “Our retention is where we’re having a challenge.”

Gorak, the principal director for resources and analysis for the Pentagon’s Chief Information Officer, said DoD has 27,000 vacancies, down from 30,000 last year. The total cyber defense workforce is comprised of roughly 225,000 service members, civilians and contractors.

Gorak said there is interest in working for the government or serve in the military. The public sector has always been able to emphasize a unique mission and a stable career. While that has been — and is — a selling point, leaders said they also need to use authorities to pay competitively and offer training. Otherwise, government will lose workers to the private sector or other agencies who are also competing for this great need.

Messaging is a part of the problem, Gorak said, especially in the search for early career talent.

“I talk to students and I tell them, ‘You can join the Department of Defense as a civilian,’” Gorak said. “They look at me like I’m cross-eyed. [They say], ‘I had no idea that we have 900,000 civilians in the DoD.’”

There is some headway being made, with the department announcing on June 12 its new Cyber Academic Engagement Office, led by Gorak. The goal is to have a dedicated office for coordinating and funding academic engagement programs for the department.

The other aspect of solving the people problem is organizing all the different pay authorities, work roles, skill requirements and types of hires across the Defense Department.

Take, for example, the basic IT job in the government, called a “2210.” Gorak said there are 54,022 employees with this position description performing 72 different work roles, illustrating how one occupation can manifest into different work depending on the office.

That’s part of what makes classification difficult, especially as technology constantly evolves to require new skills or training. The DoD Cyber Framework originally had 54 distinct work rules; now it has 72.

So, recruiters need to understand the actual work being done in order to look for it in the job market, classify it correctly, and then compensate it competitively, Gorak said.

“If you’re a GS-12 and you’re an expert, you should get paid a lot more than a GS-12 who’s at a basic level,” he added. “Pay for performance. Pay for what your actual expertise is. That’s the system we have to get.”

DoD has a number of authorities available that allow it to pay recruitment and retention bonuses, set higher starting salaries and reward high achievers. The department has direct hire authority to circumvent the USAJobs application process. The DoD Cyber Excepted Service offers a market-based pay structure that can offer as much as a 40% salary increase, Gorak said.

So far, about 15,000 positions are eligible for CES, but only 9,000 of them have actually been converted. Gorak’s team has worked to make some improvements to encourage conversion, including allowing individuals to convert instead of requiring that of an entire organization and letting the services delegate that process in-house instead of relying on one office process all conversion packets.

The only combatant command that is fully eligible for CES is Cybercom. Army Cyber Command is the second biggest.

Still, part of the reason available flexibilities haven’t been used is they’re expensive. In other cases, HR personnel don’t know they exist or aren’t trained on how to use them. That’s also why time-to-hire even for positions that should be fast-tracked remains lengthy.

On the civilian side, hiring timelines hardly improved from 2022 to 2023, and 2210 IT workers remain among the slowest to onboard.

In the meantime, the department — alongside other civilian agencies — has recognized that young people can attain digital skills without a college degree. The government is coming around to that trend, but it’s still a new way of thinking for some.

“I contend to you that there are people out there today … working in their bedroom upstairs who are outstanding cyber professionals who can do this job, but because they don’t have the experience and they don’t have the degree and they don’t have whatever certs we think are hot right now, we don’t hire them,” he said. “I think that is a mistake by the federal government, and we have to get past it.”

“So, imagine the [Defense Department] being a really big ship, with the smallest rudder you ever saw in your life trying to try to turn that ship,” he said at the 2024 TechNet Cyber conference presented by the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International on Tuesday. “That’s what the Department of Defense is.”

He doesn’t mean it derogatorily. He said it as more a statement of fact than a judgment. And, to the department’s credit, with help from outgoing Chief Information Officer John Sherman and a great deal of documents to keep these offices on the same page, they’ve made progress on the “gargantuan challenge” of getting workforce culture to support cyber security imperatives. But there’s still some work to be done.

Much of the discussion Resnick led at the event in Baltimore centered around the complex technology undergirding zero-trust, which both the military services and civilian agencies are tasked with implementing to some effect in the next few years. The DoD offices has until 2027 to hit almost a hundred different targets for zero trust. Meanwhile, the department’s 2025 budget requested roughly $977 million for zero-trust transition, C4ISRNET previously reported.

Zero-trust is, as Resnick said, just that: nothing is trusted, and as a result, there are behind-the-scenes tests that verify and validate access with, ideally, minimal intrusion on user experience. It’s an access control strategy, but it’s also analytics, automation and data.

Zero-trust is very specific but it’s also seemingly ubiquitous. The White House, even, has made cyber defenses a priority of every federal agency.

“Really, zero-trust is all of us,” said Leslie Beavers, the principal deputy CIO at the Defense Department, on Tuesday.

However, for it to work, zero-trust needs to be defined. And all the players need to be one the same page. That’s something that has happened only recently, said Resnick.

“Industry was all over the map with zero trust,” he said. “Everybody had a ZT solution. Everybody was approaching government employees and purchasers, and people were very, very, very confused in the government.”

So, Resnick’s office put structure around zero-trust. The goal, first and foremost, was to stop adversaries’ exploitation of DoD data, he said. Then, they got to work on a number of foundational documents to lay out goals and plans for achieving them, including the DoD Zero Trust Strategy and Roadmap and the “Overlays” plan.

It was an effort to synchronize the theory and actual approach of zero-trust, but inadvertently, it also influenced other countries’ zero-trust plans and reset industry’s understanding of what DoD needs, Resnick said.

“Without a doubt, I now have conversations with industry that are completely aligned to the DoD zero trust approach,” he said. “We didn’t have this two years ago. It’s a pleasure to have a conversation now, because now we’re all on the same page.”

Now that the level setting has been done, there remains the issue of change management.

The federal workforce, for one, skews older than the private sector. Data from 2022 less than 6% of government IT employees are under the age of 30, and 30% are 55 or older. While officials said the Defense Department often has more reliable and robust funding to go after new technology, federal civilian agencies may not, creating an environment where government is at various stages of adoption, and not always willing to embrace change. The pervasiveness of legacy systems also makes change hard, especially when the skills needed versus the skills available vary.

Resnick said he has seen the spirit of innovation in leadership, but it’s the mid-tier of the workforce that sometimes pushes back — the “permafrost,” as he calls it.

“They feel threatened because they do the old style of cybersecurity,” he said. “I did it myself; I totally understand. But … if they haven’t learned now, then [they’re] never going to learn. And so I truly believe it’s a generational thing. We’re going to have to wait them out until they retire out.”

That’s not to say training isn’t happening. Resnick said they worked with Defense Acquisition University to get access for CAC-holders to cyber classes that vary in length and intensity.

He said he sees a gap in industry training for zero-trust and urged members to populate that space.

That probability is what senior-level military, government and industry leaders will be discussing at this year’s flagship TechNet Cyber conference presented by the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International in Baltimore, Maryland.

This year’s theme of the three-day event beginning Tuesday is about “outpacing the threat,” and innovators in the defense technology space will discuss how their tools fit within the military’s goals to align their defenses with the nature of cyber warfare, adapt to rapidly changing environments, and accelerate ahead of global adversaries. All the topics du jour will be on the table, including artificial intelligence, large language models, contested logistics and data strategy.

Knowing future battles will transcend borders and go beyond just physical assaults on adversaries, experts in the U.S. government and industry know the tools of the future must be secure. Knowledge in itself will become an edge in battle. As nations like China seek to advance their use of artificial intelligence for military gain, so, too, are the U.S. and its allies working to understand and leverage this technology in defense of its infrastructure.

Attendees will hear from top officials from the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Defense Innovation Unit, the Joint Force Headquarters, federal chief information officers and chief technology officers, and the service’s cyber commands on the range of multidimensional threats facing their warfighters and the nation.

Registration for interested parties is open here. Here are a few highlights to note.

A keynote address kicks off the event on June 25, during which attendees will hear from Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh, commander of U.S. Cyber Command, and AFCEA President and retired Lt. Gen. Susan Lawrence. The two will open the conversation on ensuring resiliency in the defense industrial base.

Other sessions that morning will highlight progress being made on the Defense Department’s sprint toward achieving “target level” zero trust by 2027 with insights from within the Pentagon’s information office itself.

Leaders from the Army will also discuss the role of generative AI and knowledge management in warfare, and several branch officials will come together to talk about the need for establishing an Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy.

The showroom floor will also be open to display the latest technology in cybersecurity from dozens of companies.

But the tools cannot be discussed without also identifying a workforce to use them. An afternoon session on Tuesday will offer a status update on the DoD Cyber Workforce Framework.

For highlights of the conference, follow along at c4isrnet.com.

While the bill only pertains to Defense Department workers, it backs up what President Biden’s budget prescribes for the rest of the civilian workforce.

It also includes a provision boosting buyouts to $40,000, up from the current maximum of $25,000.

“Taking care of the health, safety and economic security of service members, their families, DoD civilian employees, and contractors is vital to ensuring a resilient and ready force,” the White House said in a statement on June 11.

The defense budget still has a long way to go before it can become law, and additional constraints around spending caps are likely to make partisan negotiations over policy riders like diversity and abortion all the more difficult. The Senate bill, which passed through the Armed Services Committee on June 13 in a 22-3 vote, must now go to the full chamber for approval. Then, the House will do the same with its bill before both versions can be reconciled in conference, approved again, and then sent to the President for signature by Oct. 1.

“It’ll take a great deal more seriousness from leading Senate Democrats for the promise of American strength and leadership to carry any weight,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on the floor after the vote.

If the 2% pay raise for 2025 takes effect, it’ll be considerably lower than what was offered in recent years. The total salary increase will also include a bump for locality, but in general, base pay raises tend to fall between 1-3%.

If the president or Congress took no action on setting pay, then it would be triggered automatically by a formula legislated in the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act. The Federal Salary Council has said in its advisement that the pay raise would need to be around 4% for it to comply with FEPCA.

However, it’s uncommon for both the administration and lawmakers to be mum on the issue, so that scenario has never fully materialized.

For the rest of the workforce, the president usually sends a letter at the end of August to leaders of the House and Senate that formally declares an alternative pay rate. Joe Biden did that last year on Aug. 31.

The Senate bill also sets up a 4.5% pay raise for military members, which has support from the House but would be less than what was offered to troops in January.

The difference between the civilian and military pay raise stems from limits on discretionary spending mandated by the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act, according to Pentagon officials. It’s common, but not necessary, for military and civilian annual raises to be the same.

Still, recruiting challenges remain that pressure the department to hire despite limitations in pay. A Defense Business Board study from December shows the department’s recruitment efforts are decentralized, underfunded, mired in complexity and inefficient compared to the private sector. That same report found 42% of Americans who might do well in civilian DoD positions don’t even know they exist.

Public perception, too, may be a weakness for the department as Americans have been vocal about U.S involvement in Gaza and the ongoing support the country has lended to Ukraine’s war against Russia.

The Senate’s bill aims to help the flow of talent by codifying authority to hire military spouses into non-competitive civil service positions.