The move follows a yearlong review by the Office of Personnel Management on federal workforce pay issues. In a statement, officials said the move was “the right thing to do” for the public servants and to keep wages competitive with the private sector.

“Raising pay rates across the federal government to a minimum of $15 per hour reflects our appreciation for the federal workforce and our values as a nation,” said Kiran Ahuja, director of the Office of Personnel Management. “We know that paying a living wage provides a myriad of benefits, from recruitment to retention to increased productivity, and more.”

About 67,000 individuals in the 2.2 million person federal workforce will be affected by the change.

Of that total, OPM officials said about 56,000 currently work as Defense Department employees, with most performing “non-appropriated fund activities at military bases around the country [that] provide essential services to our military, including many who are military spouses.”

In a statement, Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Gil Cisneros called the move “an important step for the civilian men and women who support the military community and their families” and a “well-deserved” pay raise.

Another 9,700 of the federal workers who will benefit from the change are VA employees. Department officials said they include custodians, housekeeping aides and food service workers.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough called the workers “critical front-line employees, central to patient safety and improved outcomes for veterans” and noted that many have acted as front-line service providers workers through the coronavirus pandemic.

The pay raises will go into effect by Jan. 30. The $15-an-hour pay rate is roughly equivalent to $31,000 a year, without overtime or bonuses.

Under changes in federal policy in 2021, all government contractors already are required to pay employees at least $15 an hour for their work.

However, a proposal in Congress in summer 2021 to guarantee service members base pay of no less than $15 an hour was rejected because of cost and implementation concerns. Enlisted troops with less than two years of military service can earn around $22,000 a year in base pay, but that does not factor in other compensation, like free health care and housing stipends.

In a statement, American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley praised the action as “one of [the president’s] most significant actions to date.”

“For the tens of thousands of workers who will start seeing more money in their paychecks each week, this is a transformative policy choice that will improve their everyday lives,” he said. “Setting a new, $15 per hour wage floor for federal government work will encourage employers across the country who are currently paying poverty wages to compete for labor and start paying fairer rates, lifting the wages of American workers across the country.”

The directive extends in-store and online exchange shopping privileges to appropriated fund and non-appropriated fund civilian employees who work in the U.S., and in U.S. territories and possessions, according to the memorandum signed by Virginia Penrod, acting under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness. It was effective April 12, and within 30 days, these shoppers will be allowed in Army and Air Force Exchange Service stores, Navy Exchange stores, and Marine Corps exchanges.

According to the latest estimates available, this will bring about 575,000 new customers into military exchanges in the U.S.

The new policy also provides online exchange shopping access for others, to include retired DoD and Coast Guard civilian employees.

The details:

*Retired civilian employees of DoD and the Coast Guard won’t get in-store exchange shopping privileges, but they will get limited online shopping privileges for exchanges and for other online Category C Morale, Welfare and Recreation activities. One example of a Category C MWR program is the American Forces Travel program, an official DoD site for travel discounts on airfare, flights, hotels, car rentals, travel packages and cruises.

*Family members won’t be allowed to shop in these on-base discount department stores, or in the online stores, but the authorized shoppers can make purchases for themselves and their dependents.

*Honorably discharged military veterans will get limited online shopping privileges at Category C MWR activities; these veterans have been allowed to shop online in exchanges since that benefit was launched in 2017.

*Those extended shopping benefits for online military exchanges and online Category C activities are effective 180 days after the directive, in mid-October for all the populations: DoD and Coast Guard civilian employees, honorably discharged veterans and retired DoD and Coast Guard civilians.

*The shopping privileges for all groups exclude purchases of tobacco products, alcoholic beverage products and military uniform items.

*The civilian employees will use their Common Access Card for the benefit. According to the directive, employees who are not issued CACs can show their locally issued proof of civilian employment for exchange access, only at the location where they are employed. Otherwise, access to the stores is not linked to employees’ work assignments.

*Verification for online shopping for all the groups will be done through the Defense Manpower Data Center, and those systems, processes and records are being updated.

*The Coast Guard is ensure that its MWR organizations, exchange system and the supporting entities put procedures in place for the access; and is coordinating with DMDC for the authentication process.

DoD civilians stationed outside the U.S. have exchange shopping privileges. DoD officials have been deliberating this policy change for about three years. Last October, a DoD official said the proposal to open the exchanges to civilians was close to being approved, and that it was expected to bring about 575,000 new eligible customers into exchanges. There are about 796,000 DoD civilians in the U.S., but about 221,000 of those employees already have exchange benefits resulting from another beneficiary category such as retiree or military spouse, said Berry Patrick, who works in the DoD Office of Morale, Welfare and Recreation and Nonappropriated Fund Policy, during a virtual conference of the American Logistics Association.

There are about 7,000 Coast Guard civilians, according to a Coast Guard website. Coast Guard exchanges already allow Coast Guard civilians to shop in their exchanges. In 2019, the Department of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard’s parent organization, opened up Coast Guard exchanges to the more than 200,000 civilian employees of the department.

These new shopping privileges don’t apply to commissaries.

This policy reverses a statement by a DoD spokeswoman in January, who told Military Times “DoD is not pursuing military exchange access for DoD civilian employees at this time.”

“Access is granted for the convenience of the DoD and Coast Guard civilian employees,” the directive states. DoD civilians are on the base every day, Patrick noted in his briefing to the American Logistics Association last October.

But the expansion is also expected to help boost the military resale system and MWR programs, which have faced a number of obstacles over recent years. Based on projections of buying patterns, Patrick said, DoD officials estimate exchange sales could increase by about $287 million a year, with a potential increase of $48 million in profits going back to support the services’ MWR programs.

One indicator of the popularity of the benefit among DoD employees was the situation in March, 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, when DoD gave base commanders temporary authority to give commissary and exchange privileges to DoD civilians and contractor employees considered mission critical. Many people misinterpreted that to mean that every DoD mission-critical civilian employee automatically got those privileges, and DoD officials were getting phone calls from those potential customers, Patrick said.

But it was up to each installation, and some commanders gave the privileges while others didn’t, for various reasons such as concern about the strains on the supply chain’s ability to provide enough products for the stores.

This is the latest of several expansions of the pool of those eligible to shop in exchanges over the last several years. In January, 2020, on-base shopping benefits at commissaries and exchanges and the use of certain MWR activities were launched for about 4.1 million veterans. The new benefits were authorized by law for all veterans with VA service-connected disability ratings; Purple Heart recipients; veterans who are former prisoners of war; and primary family caregivers of eligible veterans under the VA caregiver program.

That followed the 2017 online exchange shopping benefit offered to honorably discharged veterans, a pool of about 15 million potential shoppers.

The review, expected to last 12 weeks, is not expected to delay the deployment of the new system to the Columbus, Ohio, VA medical center this summer. But department officials acknowledged that “the order of subsequent deployments may be revised as a result of this strategic review.”

Last month, officials from the Government Accountability Office recommended postponing further expansion of the project until lingering issues with the system are resolved. They said as of last fall, “VA was at risk of deploying a system that did not perform as intended and could negatively impact the likelihood of its successful adoption.”

Department officials framed the new review as an assessment by the new administration to ensure that project timelines and requirements are realistic.

“A successful electronic health records deployment is essential in the delivery of lifetime, world-class health care for our Veterans,” VA Secretary Denis McDonough said in a statement.

“After a rigorous review of our most-recent deployment at Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center [in Washington], it is apparent that a strategic review is necessary. VA remains committed to the Cerner Millennium solution, and we must get this right for veterans.”

VA officials separately emphasized that the review is not aimed at looking whether the entire project should be reconsidered, but instead only at the pace of deployment and advance requirement needs for that work.

The 10-year health records project — heavily touted by former President Donald Trump’s administration as a transformation effort for VA — is designed to bring veterans and military medical software into alignment, allowing lifelong medical records to follow service members from through Defense Department clinics, VA medical appointments and even health visits outside the federal systems.

But deployment of Cerner’s Millennium software, already in use at the Defense Department, has had a difficult start. Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have promised close scrutiny on the new records system in the coming year, both because of the scope of the project and the reports of uneven progress in the initial stages.

Earlier this week, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., set a letter to McDonough complaining of “new stress on the Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center” — the first site to use the new system — because of shortcomings with the new records implementation.

“I am hearing from some [employees] who are deeply frustrated with the system and are not getting the support they need,” she wrote. “Nurses who go to work every day to serve our veterans should not be driven to tears because software, which was intended to be an improvement, makes their jobs more difficult.”

She also raised concerns about patient safety, citing multiple reports of prescription delays linked to the new system. Officials from Cerner have disputed whether that is a widespread problem.

They have also said that many of the initial challenges with deploying the new system were expected, and technical experts from their company and VA built space into their deployment timelines to account for improvements needed as those problems have arisen.

“Cerner supports the decision by VA to conduct a strategic program review,” said Brian Sandager, general manager of Cerner Government Services, in a statement.

“We are proud of the significant milestones we have achieved, including one of the largest health data migrations in history and the deployment of a new joint Health Information Exchange between DOD, VA and their community partners. As committed partners we welcome and value the opportunity to review the program and share lessons learned.”

VA officials have already moved more than 24 million veteran health records into the new system. All VA facilities are expected to be using the system by the end of 2028.

Maze, a hacking and ransomware group, has breached several law firms, local government databases and other companies, demanding payments for data recovery and deletion. The posted information includes VA documents, patient care records, legal fee agreements and privacy consent forms.

Two of those hacks targeted Texas-based law firm Baker Wotring in November and Woods and Woods LLC in Evansville, Indiana, this month, the Evansville Courier & Press reported.

Woods and Woods is a nationwide disability benefits firm that deals with U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs litigation.

“[Woods and Woods LLC] has notified the FBI and has taken and continues to take prompt action to contain the incident, mitigate its effects, and fully investigate,” said Neil Woods in an emailed statement to Military Times. “The firm is able to continue conducting its business since it had backups in place. The firm will provide additional information to its clients as the investigation continues.”

It is unclear, however, whether clients from the firms are aware some of their sensitive information has already posted to the web.

Baker Wotring did not respond to a request for comment.

Maze hacks an organization’s servers, notifies them of the breach and demands ransom payments to prevent data dumps, according to Brett Callow, a threat analyst with Emsisoft. If the group does not receive payment, it will publish small amounts of compromised data — “proofs” — online, accessible to anyone with internet access.

The group has previously demanded payments ranging from $1 million to several million dollars, and if payment is not received, Maze will release additional sensitive data on a staggered basis, Callow explained. Maze has already released a portion of personal documents from Woods and Woods, and the group claims to have more information.

Maze has also posted the compromised data to a Russian hacker forum, Callow said.

In some cases, other hackers will use the stolen information to target and demand ransom from individual patients or clients. Maze itself wrote on its site, “Use this information in any nefarious way that you want,” Callow said.

Ransomware and malware breaches have become devastated organizations in recent years, often crippling their ability to function or demands extraordinary sums of money.

A 2019 Emsisoft report found that 113 state and municipal governments and agencies, 764 health care providers, and 89 universities, colleges and school districts nationwide.

These groups prefer to target smaller firms with less secure cybersecurity infrastructure, Callow previously told Law.com. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a Flash Alert last month to private companies to notify them of increased Maze ransomware activities, BleepingComputer reported.

Twenty-seven states got their feet wet during the 2018 mid-terms, the bureau’s chief told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday, and he expects more will be engaged next year.

“The election network security is a very state-centric thing,” said Air Force Gen. Joseph Lengyel. “It’s not military responsibility, or National Guard responsibility, to secure it. We’re an additive measure.”

The Illinois guard played a key role in 2018, teaming with their state board of elections, Illinois’s adjutant general said.

“We also had the command-and-control cell at our state intelligence center, with our state police,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Richard Neely said. “That way, when we saw an incident come in, we identified it there and we triaged it.”

Guard members can scan networks for suspicious activity, then determine whether something is a glitch or an attack. From there, they can try some preliminary fixes to get things back online, or send more serious hacks to the state’s IT experts ― and get state or federal law enforcement involved, where necessary.

They didn’t see any true attacks during that election, he said.

“If we’re doing our business correctly, we’re hopefully seeing that beforehand, before an attack actually occurs,” he added.

Washington state is doing some homework heading in the election, its adjutant general said, putting together a 10-person team to develop a plan, look for vulnerabilities in their network and then monitor for anything strange.

Then, come election night, Army Maj. Gen. Bret Daugherty said, troops will be “on hand to respond if all of our efforts have failed and the bad guys find their way in.”

Whether each state and territory’s guard personnel are activated for the election is up to their governors, but in the mean time, units are getting prepared for bigger things.

Currently, the guard is piloting a Cyber Mission Assurance Team concept, 10-person groups of soldiers and airmen. They will focus on Defense Department and other federal installations, to assess their vulnerabilities and come up contingencies to get everything back online after a breach.

It’s expected to run in Ohio, Washington and Hawaii through next year, Lengyel said.

Multiple state guard bureaus have been on the front lines of other attacks in the past year, according to Lengyel.

Earlier this year, 54 Louisiana public schools experienced a ransomware attack, where hackers ― often through a link in an email ― take online systems hostage and demand payment to return them.

It happened twice in Texas, as well, to 23 county government systems.

“Now, it’s turned into what we would call a battle drill,” Air Force Mag. Gen. Tracy Norris, Texas’s adjutant general said, part of their standard training.

And in Colorado, according to U.S. Cyber Command’s National Guard adviser, the state had to respond to an attack on its department of transportation network.

“States are going to experience a number of attacks and they might increase, they might not,” Col. Sam Kinch said. “What we have seen is a greater effort from Cyber Command to do a higher number of persistent engagement activities, So when we have information that leads us to going after a threat, we have seen our operational tempo increase significantly over the past year.”

In any case, Lengyel said, there are agreements in place to make sure every state can call on cyber troops to help with an attack, including memoranda of understanding with neighboring states.

“I would tell you that every state has some cyber capability,” he said. “If they don’t, then they have an agreement with somewhere else to borrow it.”

While much of the new gear and experimental fighting concepts are rapidly coming to fruition for what the top Marine has dubbed the “Force 2025” initiative, the Corps is struggling to place Marines in high-end positions to man the force.

According to data obtained by Marine Corps Times, serious manpower gaps appear to be impacting fields like cyber, intelligence, drone operators, ground combat leadership and F-35B pilots — occupations Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Robert B. Neller often has highlighted as key to building the future fighting force.

High-tech stealth F-35B pilots are only manned at 33 percent, according to 2019 data. Some cyber fields are as low as 17 percent. Drone officers are manned at only 53 percent. Counterintelligence operators are at 67 ­percent, and some signals intelligence fields are manned at 69 percent.

The Corps is also in a race to plus up its low altitude air defense, or LAAD, Marines as it faces increasing air threats. In 2005, the Marine Corps eliminated 4th LAAD Battalion, and in 2007 it eliminated 1st Stinger Battery. Now the Corps is seeking an increase of 214 LAAD counter-drone Marines through fiscal year 2021 and 2022, according to documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Other fields appear grossly overmanned: Ground ­intelligence officers and signals intelligence officers are manned at more than 140 percent. And enlisted drone operators are hitting 138 percent manning.

The data obtained by Marine Corps Times via a Freedom of Information Act request is current as of February.

The manpower crunch and overpaced demand for ­high-end fields may create new opportunities for Marines in the form of retention bonuses and a slew of new occupations for Marines to progress into, as the Corps ratchets up efforts to meet the demands of a world amid great power competition.

But the Corps’ push to build the future force may also ­result in shrinking it to reinvest in what incoming ­Commandant Gen. David Berger wrote in prepared remarks to senators during his April 30 confirmation hearing as “constrained resources.” It’s an issue Berger noted as one of his “most significant challenges” as he modernizes the Marine Corps.

The Corps says these manning numbers only provided a limited snapshot of a more complex manning ­calculus, which involves juggling school seat requirements, ­building new occupations and getting Marines through career progression courses.

For schools that don’t belong to the Marine Corps, like the 7315 unmanned aircraft system or UAS officer field, seat requirements have to be registered at times two years in advance, according to Brian ­Gahagan, deputy branch head for Manpower Management Integration Branch.

Gahagan says the surface numbers are “not an accurate depiction” and that some numbers will look “skewed.” It is a multiyear build, he said.

“As new modernizing or divesting [occupational fields] mature through the process many will reflect numerically low staffing levels that, to someone outside the manpower profession, paint an ­unrealistic perspective of some primary MOSs,” Manpower and Reserve Affairs told Marine Corps Times in an emailed statement.

“It may take several years to meet the accession and training levels to fully meet the requirements and build of Marine Corps Force 2025,” Manpower and Reserve Affairs said.

Still, the challenges for the Corps to meet the demands of a dynamic world and rapidly rising ­adversaries may come with considerable sacrifices.

“We will need to conduct a deliberate redesign of the force to meet the needs of the future operating environment,” Berger said in remarks to senators.

Neller’s decision to cut the rifle squads to 12 Marines may be a glimpse of manpower changes the Corps will have to make to plus-up billets in high demand fields and to cut costs to the force.

In many cases, fields that look poorly manned actually have an adequate number of people in the occupation, but those Marines simply need to attend various career progression schools within their tracks to officially obtain some leadership billets.

Still, those Marines have yet to attend ­specific ­follow-on training for leadership positions the Corps has deemed as necessary for obtaining the occupational field, despite already sitting in the billet.

Some of those fields are simply feeder MOSs, where Marines need to attend various schoolhouses to ­obtain the occupation.

As is the case with the 0202 field or Marine ­air-ground task force intelligence officers, which is only manned at 57 percent, according to data obtained by Marine Corps Times.

Capt. Will Dunst, an unrestricted officer ­promotion planner with Manpower and Reserve Affairs, says the “assignable inventory is healthy.”

The 0202 is a feeder occupation within the 02XX field that includes other intel occupations. Dunst says the 02XX occupational field is actually manned at 87 percent, but some Marines need to attend an underutilized school known as the MAGTF [Marine air-ground task force] Intelligence Officer Course, or MIOC.

It is an issue that the Corps is addressing and has slated for action, Dunst said.

High barrier for entry

A lot of the Corps’ manning issues are solved by simply pushing Marines through their feeder MOSs and getting them to schoolhouses.

But for some fields, high barriers to entry are ­preventing Marines from obtaining the occupation; and in other cases, demand for the field is simply creating pipeline logjams, real manpower concerns that can’t simply be addressed by stamping billet assignments for Marines who have not actually ­obtained the primary field.

The 0211-counterintelligence field has ­historically had manning problems associated with a ­multitude of barriers that hinder Marines entering the field.

The field is a lateral move primary occupation that requires a top secret sensitive compartmented information clearance and a high ASVAB test general technical score of 110, which Maj. Lucas Crider, end strength planner and enlisted plans for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, described as a “historically very high” barrier.

To complicate the matter, Marines wishing to enter the field were often put through overly subjective evaluations, like essay writing and interviews.

Crider says the Corps has since removed some of the more subjective requirements and standardized the screening process.

Data obtained by Marine Corps Times says the field is manned at 67 percent, but Crider says the overall inventory of counterintelligence Marines is at 82 percent and that the field has been trending ­upward for the past couple of years.

Within the aviation community, new job fields like the 7315 unmanned aerial system officer field and the 7518 F-35B occupation are outpacing the demand and available school seats.

For the drone field, the Air Force runs the ­schoolhouse, and the Corps only has a finite number of seats.

According to Dunst, the Corps is working with the Air Force to increase seats. But increasing seats also comes with opportunity costs in manpower from the fleet, as often pilots have to staff cadre schoolhouse ­positions.

For the officer drone field, the Corps is also ­looking at leveraging redesignations for pilots, who for ­whatever reason may not have completed ­pilot ­training. This could allow the Corps to recapitalize on skills the Marine may already have learned.

Dunst called it a “good use of taxpayer money.”

From the enlisted side of the house, the 7314 UAS field is overmanned at 138 percent. But Dunst says that growing requirements will eventually balance it.

The F-35 pilot training is running into similar problems where the demand is simply “outpacing training capacity,” Dunst said.

The Corps is pushing a number of initiatives like pilot bonuses and a program called “2P captain ­continuation” to help shore up the F-35B field.

The captain continuation program, for those Marines selected and recommended by a board, allows captains passed over twice for promotion to be offered a chance to continue.

The newly minted 1700 cyber field, ­according to data obtained by Marine Corps Times, is critically short.

The 1705 cyberspace warfare development officer is manned at only 17 percent, the 1721 cyberspace ­defensive operator is staffed at 63 percent, and the 1799 cyber operations chief field is manned at 55 percent, data show.

While the numbers look bad, the cyber field is barely a half year old and many of the fields are only in their first year of MOS production.

The requirements to get these Marines through the pipeline training have been registered, Dunst said.

For the cyber defensive operator field, the Corps just kicked off the first accession school in the second quarter of fiscal year 2019 and simply hasn’t graduated the Marines from that course, according to Dunst.

In some cases, manpower numbers are crunched because the Corps has created new schools.

In 2019, the Corps created the new 0521 psychological operations field, or psyops, which according to data is only manned at 63 percent. Officials at Manpower and Reserve Affairs say the inventory of psyops Marines is actually at 67 percent.

The field used to be an additional MOS and only recently became a primary field, but after completing a tour in psyop, those Marines would leave the field. That has caused the numbers to appear low.

While bleeding talent, Crider says the field has a “difficult school to get through.”

To make the field healthy, the Corps is trying to ­entice psyops Marines who left the field to come back. And now, once Marines laterally move to the field they can stay in the community, Crider said.

Crider said that the field is on track and should hit its authorized billet number of 49 Marines by the end of this fiscal year. There are currently 33 psyop Marines.

The Corps also has created new signals intelligence fields such as 2611 cryptologic cyberspace analyst, manned at 3 percent, and 2629 signals intelligence electronic warfare tech field, manned at 76 percent.

For the 2611 field, the schoolhouse is new and has yet to graduate anyone. And the 2629 field is a feeder occupation within the 26XX signals intel field, where Marines just need to attend follow on leadership and career progression schools.

While a lot of manning issues for the Force 2025 initiative can be solved by pushing Marines through the career progression schoolhouses, there are some serious concerns for fields like cyber, drone operators and F-35 pilots.

The Corps says it is addressing the issues, registering ­schoolhouse requirements and working with sister ­services to increase class seats, while also offering bonuses and job redesignations to help plus up the fields.

At the end of the day, the future force has several years to hit its goals.

New gear, tech, weapons, vehicles and aircraft are already hitting the fleet. And the Corps has signed off on its new expeditionary advanced base operations concept to confront a rising China in the Pacific.

The manpower to staff the new fields to put all the new toys and fighting concepts is slowly catching up.

“The NDS [national defense strategy] forces us to establish strategic priorities and make difficult choices — which will mean doing less in certain areas so we can do more in others,” Berger wrote to senators.