Military Spouse Tuition Program Gets the Axe

Military Spouse Tuition Program Gets the Axe

Those who have unlimited faith in the ability of the government to conceive, plan for and execute programs on behalf of its constituents probably won’t be daunted by this story, but for the rest of us it is hard to be optimistic about the government’s ability to solve problems for people.

Not long ago the military came up with a program to offer tuition assistance to the spouses of active duty military personnel and also the

spouses of reservists who had been called to active duty. The program would pay $6,000 to a military spouse to cover the cost of tuition or other related education expenses for attending college or a trade school. The budget for the first year of the program was set at $61 million, and for the second year $65 million was requested. A few quick pokes on your calculator will show that the planners apparently expected about 10,000 military spouses a year to apply for this tuition program.

Up until the early part of 2010 they were only off by a factor of 12. In others words, 10,000 military spouses per month, not per year, were applying for the program. Obviously there were budget clouds on the near horizon. In January the word must have really gotten out about this program, and 70,000 military spouses applied in that month alone. So in other words in one month alone seven times the yearly plan applied for the program. Based on these figures it looks like the people who were planning and executing this program were off by a factor of 20-30 or more, so they were so far from their targets that panic must have set in.

The planning for this program was ridiculously off base, but the reaction to the problem was even more revealing. The Pentagon could have approached Congress to explain the dilemma, but instead they simply cut off the program. On top of that they did not inform individuals that the program was being terminated. They just stopped it. So a lot of military spouses who had gone to the trouble of applying for school and who expected this advertised assistance, suddenly found themselves holding an empty bag.

Not surprisingly a good number of the military personnel involved along with their spouses contacted their elected representatives. Enough noise was made that the issue became known to the highest levels of the Pentagon. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was questioned by the defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and he admitted that just cutting the program off abruptly and without notice was not a good idea.

All this agitation has had some effect since people who had been accepted into the program and who had not been paid are now being paid. No new applications are being accepted, however.

Although this program does not resemble the massive new health care bill that was recently passed, if it is even a remote indicator of what is liable to happen when that bill starts being implemented, we all could be in for big surprises regarding the costs of health care. Once again, it is not easy to be optimistic.