Keep faith with the people who serve, and the families who serve with them
My grandfather wore this country’s uniform, and so did my father. I gave the Air Force twenty-one years, and my husband gave his career to service too. We know what it’s like when new orders turn the house upside down, when a spouse gives up another job with every move, and when the bills don’t wait for the paperwork to clear. No one who serves this country should come up short at home.
Where I stand
When you raise your hand, your whole family raises it with you. Your spouse gives up a job every time the orders come. Your kids change schools every couple of years. And about one in four people on active duty has gone without enough food. Study after study shows that isn’t about the pay rate: even our most junior troops out-earn most of their civilian peers. It’s about how the military runs family life. It moves a spouse away from a job every two or three years. It orders a move and then pays back less than the move costs. It sets housing allowances off the cheapest rent outside the gate. Those are the military’s own policies, and I’ll change them: fix how housing allowances are set, make the food allowance count the whole family, and make the military pay the full cost of the moves it orders.
The Guard and Reserve carry the same mission with less of the support. A Montana Guard member can deploy next to an active-duty airman and come home to no health coverage, and the days they trained don’t count toward the GI Bill the same way. I want one force that takes care of all of them.
Montana has more veterans per person than all but two states, and our veterans die by suicide at a rate far above the national one. This plan runs from the day someone enlists to long after they come home.
Take care of the family
✓Fix how housing allowances are set. Define a “suitable neighborhood” with real standards (crime, schools, commute) instead of pricing junior families into the cheapest rent outside the gate. Collect enough rental data to get it right, and publish the method so families can check the math. Then restore the allowance to cover 100% of the rent it’s based on, not 95%.
✓Fix the Basic Needs Allowance. Stop counting the housing allowance as income, so a junior family in an expensive market isn’t disqualified by the allowance meant to house them, and pay it automatically instead of making families apply and prove it every year.
✓Let the food allowance count the family. Today the food allowance covers only the service member. Scale it with the number of dependents, up to a cap, using USDA’s own family food-cost numbers.
✓Keep pay raises on the formula Congress already uses, tied to private-sector wage growth, and put the extra effort where the research says the problem is.
✓Pay for the move instead of lending it. The allowance meant to cover moving costs has to be requested, an advance on it needs a commander’s approval and isn’t guaranteed to arrive before the move, and a new service member moving to a first duty station gets none of it unless family moves too. What’s reliably there up front is an advance on their own paycheck, repaid over 12 months. Pay the moving allowance automatically, before every move including the first one, and set it at what a move really costs, so no one borrows against their own pay to follow orders.
✓Put spouses in the room. The law requires financial training for service members at set points in their careers, like arriving at a first duty station or getting married. Spouses aren’t part of that requirement. Bring them into the same training, before the first move.
✓Count it and fix it. Require each service to measure food insecurity among its families every year and report it to Congress with a plan to bring it down.
Guard and Reserve
✓Pass the Healthcare for Our Troops Act: premium-free TRICARE for every Guard and Reserve member.
✓Pass the Guard and Reserve GI Bill Parity Act, so every day in uniform counts toward the GI Bill.
✓Enforce the law that protects a Guard or Reserve member’s civilian job when they’re called up.
Every uniformed service
The Coast Guard, the Public Health Service and the NOAA Corps wear the uniform too. In last fall’s shutdown, Public Health Service and NOAA officers, their retirees and their surviving spouses went unpaid while the other services got paid, and NOAA crews flew into Hurricane Melissa without a paycheck. In Montana, Public Health Service officers staff Indian Health Service clinics on our reservations.
✓Pay every uniformed service member on time, every time, shutdown or not, by law instead of by workaround.
✓Pass the Uniformed Services Leave Parity Act and the bipartisan bill to protect Public Health Service and NOAA retirees’ pay in a shutdown.
Child care
✓Pay the people who work in base child care centers enough to fill the jobs. Centers turn kids away for lack of staff, not lack of rooms.
✓Make off-base child care help work wherever the orders send you. When a base child care center is full or too far away, the military’s fee assistance program (Military Child Care in Your Neighborhood) helps pay a civilian provider. But in most of the country, only a nationally accredited provider qualifies. About twenty states and counties let families use state-licensed providers rated in the state’s own quality system instead. Everywhere else, a military family is stuck with a short list. Open it up in every state, so the help follows the family to any duty station. Hundreds of young Montanans enlist every year, and Montana has just one active-duty base, so most of them raise their families somewhere else. That’s why this has to work everywhere, including Montana, where child care covers less than half of what families need and 209 programs are already rated in the state’s own quality system.
✓Make the payment match what care costs. The monthly provider cap used to figure fee assistance just went from $1,800 to $2,000, and a five-year pilot adds up to 30% for children under two in high-cost areas. Set the cap to real local prices everywhere, including rural places where there’s no base center to fall back on.
Spouse careers
✓Enforce the license-portability law, so a nurse, teacher or electrician doesn’t start over at every move.
✓Pass the Military Spouse Hiring Act.
✓When orders cost a spouse a job, unemployment benefits should follow. Most states already treat quitting to follow PCS orders as good cause. Make it the rule in every state.
✓Make the remote-work hiring authority for military spouses permanent. Congress created it in 2023, and it expires at the end of 2028.
✓Protect military spouses’ remote federal jobs in law. Today a spouse’s remote job survives a move only because agency memos exempt them from return-to-office orders and hiring freezes. Write that protection into statute.
✓Stop making military spouses in federal jobs the first ones cut.
Moves
✓Hold the moving system accountable. After the $17.9 billion moving contract collapsed, families still move with broken furniture and missing boxes. Pay claims fast, and put the contractor on the hook, not the family.
✓Reimburse what a move really costs. Six in ten families who moved recently paid more than $1,000 of their own money for a move the military ordered.
✓Fewer, smarter moves: longer tours where the mission allows, timed around school years and spouse jobs.
Safe homes on base
✓A tenant bill of rights with teeth for privatized housing: independent inspections, rent withheld when a home is unsafe, and real penalties for companies that leave families in mold. When the Defense Department’s own Inspector General watched housing inspections, none were done correctly.
Military kids
✓Fully fund Impact Aid for school districts that teach military kids on federal land that pays no property tax.
✓Fix the Exceptional Family Member Program, so a family with a child who needs special care isn’t sent where that care doesn’t exist.
Justice: protect the reform that’s working
For years, commanders decided whether a sexual assault case went to trial, and too often the answer was no. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand fought for a decade to hand those cases to independent, trained prosecutors, and in 2023 it finally happened. Since then, the number of service members who reported unwanted sexual contact has dropped by almost a third. And Pete Hegseth has spent his time as Secretary pulling the support out from under it. He fired the military’s top lawyers for being “roadblocks,” froze the hiring of the people who prevent assaults, cut off rape kits for civilians at overseas clinics until Congress made him stop, and ordered a “ruthless” review of every military legal office to put “maximum lethality” ahead of legality. I spent my career investigating the worst crimes there are. I know what it takes to get a case to trial, and I won’t let him quietly undo this.
✓Protect the independent Office of Special Trial Counsel in law, so no Secretary can weaken it by memo.
✓Fund and staff sexual assault prevention and victim services, and exempt them from hiring freezes.
✓Keep the military’s lawyers independent. Their job is to tell leaders what the law allows, and nobody should be fired for doing it.
Civilians and contractors
✓Stop cutting the civilian workforce blind. The Pentagon cut about 78,000 civilian positions in 2025, and the Government Accountability Office found it did so without assessing what the cuts would do to the mission. The people who fix the aircraft, run the depots, staff the clinics and process the pay are part of how the military works.
✓Restore their right to bargain. In April 2026 Hegseth ordered most of the department’s union contracts terminated under Executive Order 14251. What an executive order took away, a law can put back.
✓When a contractor fails the mission, the contractor pays, not the family.
Veterans
✓Pass the Major Richard Star Act. Eighty senators, including both of Montana’s, have signed on, and it still hasn’t gotten a vote.
✓Reverse the VA staffing cuts. Guarantee real access from every Montana reservation. Fully fund the PACT Act.
✓Protect the disability ratings veterans have earned. No means-testing, no age cutoffs on unemployability, and no quietly downgrading PTSD, TBI, or sleep-apnea claims to save money.
✓Make veteran suicide prevention a front-line priority, including safe firearm storage that veterans lead and trust. Three of every four veteran suicides in Montana involve a firearm.
Montana’s installations
✓Malmstrom and the Sentinel missile program: build it with Montana union labor.
✓Back the 120th Airlift Wing and Montana’s Guard units: the missions, the aircraft and the full-time jobs that keep them ready.
By the numbers
1 in 4
About one in four active-duty service members were food insecure, and 45% of spouses of junior enlisted troops. Study after study finds it doesn’t track with the pay rate.RAND, 2023
Six in ten military families who moved in the past two years paid more than $1,000 of their own money beyond what the military reimbursed, up from 45% in 2023.Military Family Advisory Network survey, 2026
7,400
The Pentagon’s $17.9 billion moving contract collapsed: 7,400 of about 20,000 shipments had to be pulled from the contractor for failing to perform before the contract was terminated in June 2025.GAO, via Stars and Stripes, 2025
In the October 2025 shutdown, Public Health Service and NOAA Corps officers, their retirees and surviving spouses missed their paychecks while the other services were paid. NOAA crews flew Hurricane Melissa unpaid.MOAA, 2025
29,061 → 20,492
After independent prosecutors took over sexual assault cases in December 2023, the number of active-duty members reporting unwanted sexual contact fell from 29,061 in 2023 to 20,492 in 2025.DoD Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, FY2025
3rd
Montana has the third-most veterans per person in the country. About one in thirteen Montanans has served, 88,543 people.VA data, via Montana Free Press, 2025
53.9
Montana’s veteran suicide rate was 53.9 per 100,000 in 2023, far above the national veteran rate of 35.2. Three in four of those deaths involved a firearm.VA Montana Veteran Suicide Data Sheet, 2023
80 senators
The Major Richard Star Act has 80 Senate cosponsors, including both of Montana’s senators, and 336 in the House. It has been blocked on the Senate floor four times and still hasn’t gotten a vote.congress.gov; Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, 2026
Sources: RAND, Food Insecurity Among Members of the Armed Forces and Their Dependents (2023) · Fourteenth Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation (2025) · Blue Star Families, 2025 Military Family Lifestyle Survey · CRS IN12380 (Basic Needs Allowance), IN12706 (FY2027 pay), IN12648 (FY2026 NDAA child care), IN12217 (Military Spouse Employment Act) · GAO-21-137 (housing allowance data) · CNA, Evaluation of Basic Allowance for Housing (2025) · 10 U.S.C. §992 · Joint Travel Regulations; Military OneSource (dislocation allowance) · Military Family Advisory Network (2026) · GAO via Stars and Stripes (moving contract, 2025) · DoD 2024 Active Duty Spouse Survey · Military OneSource (MCCYN-PLUS) · Montana Department of Labor & Industry, Child Care Deserts (2025) · Montana DPHHS STARS to Quality · DoD Inspector General (privatized housing, 2025) · DoD Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, FY2025 · Stars and Stripes, Military Times, AP (2025–2026 reporting on military justice and prevention staffing) · Gillibrand–Murkowski letter (April 28, 2025) · GAO via Government Executive (civilian workforce, 2026) · Defense One (union contracts, 2026) · MOAA (spouse survey; Public Health Service and NOAA shutdown pay) · National Guard Association of the United States · congress.gov (S. 1032, H.R. 2102, S. 2575, S. 649, H.R. 1423) · VA Montana Veteran Suicide Data Sheet (2023) · Montana Free Press (2025) · OPA, Population Representation in the Military Services, FY2021 · Army Directive 2012-08 (Total Force). Bills are named as introduced; status shifts each Congress.