Active duty spouses can weigh in on several key issues – including many MOAA advocacy priorities – via DoD’s 2024 Survey of Active Duty Spouses, which will run over the next two months.

[TAKE THE SURVEY]

The biennial survey covers topics such as spouse employment, child care, family finances, and others at the heart of military quality of life. DoD “relies on the survey findings to make the decisions that will best meet [spouses’] needs,” Patricia Montes Barron, deputy assistant secretary of defense for military community and family policy, said in a Jan. 10 press release announcing the survey.

The findings do more than inform DoD decisions – they provide much-needed data for MOAA and fellow military advocacy groups. That data helps shape advocacy priorities and supports our push to protect service-earned benefits and improve quality of life for military families.

“The more hard evidence we can present to lawmakers and their staffs, the stronger our case for badly needed reforms and new approaches to long-term challenges like spouse unemployment and child care access,” said Jen Goodale, MOAA’s director of government relations for Military Family and Survivor Policy. “If a program is working, we need to know so we can fight to preserve it. If a program isn’t working, we need to make sure it’s being implemented properly, or we need to find another path to get military families the support they need.”

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Results from a 2021 DoD survey echoed many of MOAA’s legislative priorities, showing continued employment struggles – a 21% unemployment rate, about where it’s been for at least a decade – as well as food insecurity concerns and an overall drop in satisfaction with military life.

These findings helped inform some of MOAA’s current work on the Hill on behalf of military spouses, to include:

• Support for the Military Spouse Hiring Act, which would encourage businesses to hire military spouses via the Work Opportunity Tax Credit. Nearly 4,600 visitors to MOAA’s Legislative Action Center have asked their lawmakers to move this legislation forward; join that group today.
  
  
• Support for the READINESS Act, recently introduced legislation which would allow more job flexibility to spouses of active duty servicemembers employed by federal agencies. Ask your House member to support the legislation by sending them a prewritten message.
  
  
• Continued work to improve the overall quality of life for military families, with the survey’s figures on spouse dissatisfaction a clear indicator of military retention concerns to complement ongoing recruiting challenges.

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The survey will take most spouses less than 20 minutes to complete, per the DoD release. It can be accessed through DoDSurveys.mil.

Have additional feedback on these quality of life concerns? Email legis@moaa.org. Want to stay informed on MOAA’s advocacy efforts? Bookmark MOAA’s Advocacy News page and be sure to register for our Legislative Action Center.