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 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.

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.”

During his confirmation hearing earlier month, some lawmakers, including Gillibrand, expressed apprehension about Mattis’ ability to approach the job as a civilian — not a 44-year military officer. Mattis sought to assuage those concerns, saying the top role of defense secretary mandates a careful balance of military and diplomatic solutions.

“We shouldn’t be turning to the military,” he said, “to answer all of our problems in the world.”

Andrew deGrandpre is Military Times’ senior editor at Pentagon bureau chief. On Twitter:

. With reporting by Leo Shane III and Joe Gould.

“To retain these veterans, employers must do more to help their non-veteran employees — especially human resources professionals and hiring managers — understand military service and structure,” the report notes.

The study also found that female veterans tend to struggle more with finding a post-military job than men.

Roughly 56 percent of male veterans said they found employment within four months of separation. Only 45 percent of female veterans said they did.

Program officials said they hope the findings can redirect veterans employment efforts to more focused results, given the success of broader initiatives in recent years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated roughly 7 percent of veterans were unemployed in 2014, but recent months’ estimates have fallen below 5 percent.

Leo Shane III covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He can be reached at lshane@militarytimes.com .

Of the $4.79 trillion total calculated in the report, about $1.7 trillion comes from direct war appropriations over the last 15 years. The White House has already requested another $65 billion in overseas contingency funding as part of the fiscal 2017 budget.

Crawford also includes in her costs of war a rise in defense base budget spending related to the overseas conflicts of about $733 billion, and another $565 billion in related State Department and Department of Homeland Security programs.

And the total also includes more than $1.2 trillion in increased and future costs for veterans’ health care. That doesn’t include other VA benefits, such as the post-9/11 GI Bill and home loans.

Crawford notes that future interest on debts associated with unpaid war costs “will likely be many trillions of dollars,” further adding to the total.

“Even if the U.S. stopped spending on war at the end of this fiscal year, interest costs alone on borrowing to pay for the wars will continue to grow apace,” she wrote.

The full report is available online at the Institute’s web site.

Leo Shane III covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He can be reached at lshane@militarytimes.com.