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About this candidate response
DutyStation contacts candidates to ask whether and how they support service members, military families and veterans, and invites them to share their thoughts and priorities. We share their replies here in the candidate’s or campaign’s own words, with minor formatting for readability and correction of obvious spelling mistakes.
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The campaign supplied the summary below and identified its military and veterans plan as the authoritative full version. The full plan is linked in Campaign Contact.
Quality of life
- Her core argument is that the problem is not the pay rate. Counting pay, allowances and the tax advantage, the most junior enlisted troops already out-earn 94 of every 100 civilian peers, yet about one in four active-duty members has been food insecure, and 45 percent of spouses of junior enlisted troops. The gap is in how military life is run, and those are the military's own policies.
Pay and allowances
- Keep pay raises on the formula Congress already uses, tied to private-sector wage growth. Fix how housing allowances are set: define a suitable neighborhood with real standards for crime, schools and commute instead of pricing junior families into the cheapest rent outside the gate, publish the method so families can check the math, and restore the allowance to 100 percent of the rent it is based on rather than 95. Fix the Basic Needs Allowance by no longer counting the housing allowance as income, and pay it automatically instead of making families reapply every year. Let the food allowance scale with dependents using USDA's own family food-cost numbers; today it covers only the service member.
Child care
- Centers turn children away for lack of staff, not lack of rooms, so pay base child care workers enough to fill the jobs. Then make off-base help portable: the fee assistance program generally requires a nationally accredited provider, and only about twenty states and counties let families use state-licensed providers rated in the state's own quality system instead. Open that up everywhere, so the help follows the orders. Montana has one active-duty base, so most Montanans who enlist raise their families elsewhere, which is exactly why this has to work in every state.
Spouse employment
- Enforce the license-portability law. Pass the Military Spouse Hiring Act. Make unemployment benefits follow a spouse who leaves a job for PCS orders in every state, as most already do. Make the 2023 remote-work hiring authority for spouses permanent before it expires at the end of 2028, and write protection for spouses' remote federal jobs into statute rather than leaving it to agency memos.
Moves
- Pay the moving allowance automatically, before every move including the first one, and set it at what a move actually costs. Six in ten families who moved recently paid more than $1,000 out of pocket for a move the military ordered, and what is reliably available up front is an advance on their own paycheck, repaid over twelve months. Hold the moving system accountable after the $17.9 billion contract collapsed: pay claims fast and put the contractor on the hook rather than the family. Then fewer, smarter moves, with longer tours where the mission allows, timed around school years and spouse jobs.
Guard and Reserve
- Pass the Healthcare for Our Troops Act for premium-free TRICARE, pass the Guard and Reserve GI Bill Parity Act so every day in uniform counts, and enforce civilian job protection on activation. A Montana Guard member can deploy beside an active-duty airman and come home to no health coverage.
Every uniformed service
- In last fall's shutdown, Public Health Service and NOAA officers went unpaid while the other services were 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 by law rather than by workaround.
Veterans
- 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.
- Pass the Major Richard Star Act, which would end the offset for combat-injured Chapter 61 retirees and affects roughly 255,000 veterans. Eighty senators have cosponsored it, including both of Montana's, and it still has not received a vote.
- Reverse the VA staffing cuts and restaff frontline clinical and claims positions. Fully fund the PACT Act. Guarantee real access from every Montana reservation through Community Care, clinics, telehealth and a veterans service officer within reach.
- Protect earned disability ratings: no means-testing, no age cutoffs on individual unemployability, and no quiet downgrading of PTSD, traumatic brain injury or sleep apnea claims to save money.
- Make veteran suicide prevention a front-line priority, including veteran-led safe firearm storage. Three of every four veteran suicides in Montana involve a firearm. She is a gun owner who carried one professionally for twenty-one years, which is why she insists that work be veteran-led rather than imposed.
Family housing
- 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 observed housing inspections, none of them were conducted correctly. The affordability half is the housing allowance fix above.
First priorities
- The allowance and moving fixes, because they are the military's own policies and need no new program: how the housing allowance is calculated, the Basic Needs Allowance income counting, scaling the food allowance to family size, and paying the moving allowance automatically at real cost. Alongside that, the Major Richard Star Act, which needs a floor vote rather than persuasion.
Experience and military justice
- Her grandfather and her father both wore the uniform. She gave the Air Force twenty-one years and retired a lieutenant colonel, and her husband gave his career to service as well. In her words from the plan: "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."
- She also spent her career as a federal investigator, which is behind one item you will not find on most candidates' pages: protecting the independent Office of Special Trial Counsel in statute. Reports of unwanted sexual contact have fallen by nearly a third since independent prosecutors took those cases out of the chain of command, and she does not intend to let that be undone by memo.
Sources cited by the campaign
- The figures above come from RAND, the Fourteenth Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation, the Defense Department Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office. Each is cited on the page.