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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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Organized by topic. Email greetings and sign-offs are omitted; campaign contact details appear alongside.
Government shutdown and cooperation
- I oppose a shutdown in 2027 or any year. A shutdown is Congress refusing to do the one job the Constitution assigns it by name, and the people who pay for it first are the ones who cannot stop working. Last year proved it. The shutdown ran forty-three days, the longest in our history, and 1.3 million service members came within days of missing a paycheck for the first time in any modern shutdown. Pay kept flowing only because the Pentagon raided its research and procurement accounts, pulled from housing allowance money, and accepted a private donation from a billionaire. Troops still got short or incorrect checks in October. That is not a system. That is a scramble, and it should never have been necessary.
- And the Coast Guard feels it first. It is funded through Homeland Security, not Defense, so a stopgap covering the Pentagon leaves the CG out. In 2019 that meant the Coast Guard became the first branch of the armed forces in American history to go unpaid during a shutdown, with the Red Cross helping its families get by. Last year it was spared only by an arrangement the department never explained. I would cosponsor the bipartisan Pay Our Coast Guard Act, which simply treats Coast Guardsmen like every other service member when the government closes, and I would not vote for any military pay protection that leaves them out again.
- If/When Democrats hold the House, I would work with this administration the way I would with any: pass the twelve appropriations bills on time, one at a time, and refuse to attach unrelated policy to any of them. Most shutdowns are not fights over the budget; they are fights over something somebody tried to hide in it. Take the riders out and the shutdown usually goes with them.
- If one happens anyway, two things should be automatic. Pay for the uniformed military and essential civilians should be guaranteed by permanent law, not rescued by an emergency directive a week in. And veterans' healthcare, disability payments, survivor benefits, and the GI Bill should be funded in advance, the way VA medical care already is, so a lapse cannot reach them.
- The third thing is Congress. During the last shutdown, members kept getting paid while service members did not, and some announced they were refusing their checks. That was decent of them, and it is not a system. If the people who cannot walk off the job are not paid, congressional pay should be held in escrow until the government reopens. This should be law, not just a press release. A member who feels the shutdown in her own household will work to end it faster.
Quality of life
- I live in a Navy town, and the priorities I hear are not abstract. Pay first: base pay and the housing allowance should track what things cost where the service member is stationed, not a national average that leaves a family in a high-cost area short every month. Healthcare second: a military family should not lose its doctor every time it moves, and TRICARE appointment waits should be measured and published the way the VA's are. I spent thirty years in healthcare, and I know what a referral that takes three months does to a person who needs to be seen now.
- Childcare third, and I would put it ahead of almost everything: a two-earner family cannot stay in the service if the base childcare waitlist is a year long, and the fix is pay for childcare workers, not another study. Spouse employment fourth: every state should recognize a military spouse's professional license on arrival, and I would support making that a condition of federal funds where states refuse.
- On moves: fewer of them when readiness allows, longer notice, and a reimbursement system that pays before the family has to borrow. A family that moves every two years on the government's order should never be fronting the government money.
Veterans' care
- The veterans I cared for as a respiratory therapist needed as much help accessing their benefits as they needed medical care from me. That is the problem: the care exists and the path to it does not.
- Timely care means staffing. The VA has lost a large share of its workforce through attrition and hiring freezes while demand rose. I would vote to fund the positions, fill them, and publish wait times by facility so a veteran in Porterville knows whether to drive to Bakersfield or Fresno. Community care should be a door that opens when the VA cannot meet its own standard, not a substitute for meeting it.
- Mental health means same-day access: a veteran who asks for help gets seen that day, by a person, and the crisis line gets a call back within the hour. Disability benefits mean a decision with a deadline and a reason, and an end to the practice of denying first and sorting it out on appeal.
- Transition to civilian life means starting to plan a year out, not a week out, with one person responsible for the file. And I would fix something I know from my own profession: a corpsman or medic who did the work for six years should be able to sit for a civilian credential without starting over.
Family housing
- Let's start with what I see at home. There is less family housing on base than there used to be, so more families are pushed into the local rental market. In a small town with a tight supply, rents have outgrown both wages and the housing allowance. A junior enlisted family with orders here is not choosing between a good unit and a bad one; they are choosing between a long drive and a place they cannot afford.
- So the first fix is arithmetic. If access to base housing keeps shrinking, the housing allowance has to rise to match what the private market actually charges in that specific town, recalculated often enough to keep up and never cut in a year when rents rose. The allowance was built on an assumption that most families would live on base. Fewer and fewer can. The number should follow the reality. It should also never again be treated as a pot to raid, as it was last year to cover payroll during the shutdown.
- The second is supply. I would advocate to fund new and rehabilitated family housing on the installations that lost it, and I would make the Defense Department report, base by base, how many units it has, how many it has lost, and what the local rent gap is.
- The third is accountability for what exists. Repair deadlines in the contract, the company paying for a hotel when a home is unsafe past the deadline, independent inspections a family can request, a tenant advocate who works for neither the contractor nor the command, and authority to end a contract for repeat violations. A family that reports a hazard should be protected from retaliation in writing.
- The test is simple: would the contractor's own executives let their children sleep in the unit. If the answer is no, neither should a private's.