Some Calif. Congress members say Guard didn’t explain scale of enlistment bonus repayments
WASHINGTON – Some of California’s members of Congress say California’s National Guard did not explain in 2014 how many guard members were being forced to repay enlistment bonuses.
On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter ordered the Pentagon to suspend all efforts to collect reimbursement from the nearly 10,000 California National Guard members who were improperly given bonuses as an incentive to reenlist at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Earlier in the week, a senior California National Guard official said it told the state’s members of Congress two years ago the Pentagon was trying to claw back re-enlistment bonuses from thousands of soldiers, and even offered a proposal to mitigate the problem, but Congress took no action.
After the Los Angeles Times first reported the problem Sunday, most of California’s 55 members of Congress signed onto letters to Carter, or House and Senate leaders, asking for an immediate fix. On Wednesday, they praised the Defense Department for halting the clawbacks and said Congress needs to stop the process entirely and refund the guard members who already have repaid money.
Still, some members took issue with the California guard’s characterization of what it told the California delegation two years ago.
Staff in members’ offices said the guard broadly mentioned the clawbacks in a 2014 letter detailing its policy goals for the year, but officials didn’t meet with members of Congress in person or by phone, and didn’t otherwise tell them about the scale of the issue. Such letters are fairly common from groups working with Congress.
“If they would have come and said, ‘You’re going to have thousands of combat veterans having their wages garnished and tax liens being put on them,’ we would have been all over this,” said Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine. “That was never communicated to us.”
Rep. Tony Cardenas, D-Los Angeles, said neither the Pentagon nor California guard officials told him about the large number of soldiers ordered to repay bonuses, though his office had received complaints from individual soldiers.
Several high-ranking members of the delegation said this week they first heard of the scope of the problem from the Times’ reporting.
The California guard also sent members of Congress a suggested provision that would have allowed debt waivers for the affected soldiers in the 2015 defense authorization bill.
Reps. Paul Cook, R-Yucca Valley, and Jeff Denham, R-Turlock, initially pushed for the provision but later abandoned the effort, and it didn’t appear in the final bill.
Cook said he dropped the effort after being told the Pentagon already had the power to waive the debts. Denham declined to talk about why the provision was dropped. His staff said he has worked one on one with affected constituents.
Guard officials said they were told the provision was discarded because waiving the debt would have cost the Pentagon money, requiring the estimated costs to be offset with cuts elsewhere in the defense budget.