DoD-commissioned report seeks to overhaul confusing reserve duty status system

More than 30 different duty statuses under which National Guard members and reservists can be called to service could be consolidated into just four categories, a new Defense Department-commissioned report found. 

Unlike active-duty troops who remain in one status, reservists and National Guard members move between multiple duty statuses depending on the type of service they perform. Over time, the system has grown to include more than 30 separate statutes scattered across about 20 different titles of federal law, creating inequities in pay and benefits and frequent administrative delays when members shift between statuses.

“It’s been a very gradual build up process, and so over time, there have been these gaps that have been developed where a reserve component member may be doing duty of one sort right next to reserve component duty person doing that kind of duty right next to them and they’re receiving potentially different pay and benefits. Or it could be the case where they’re on one sort of duty, they come to do their next day of duty, and they’re on a different status, and their underlying pay and benefits may change,” Lisa Harrington, senior operations researcher at RAND, told Federal News Network.

Over the last two decades, the Defense Department has tried to simplify and reform the reserve duty status system, but most attempts have failed to gain traction. 

“There have been many calls for reform. None of them have actually done wholesale reform, though many of them have applied band-aids. Back in 2002 is when we start looking at these calls for this duty status system to be reformed. The problem is big and it’s complex. There are concerns about the cost,” Harrington said.

But DoD, with the help of RAND Corp., is now reviving a 2015 commission proposal to simplify the system. That plan, outlined by the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission, initially recommended replacing dozens of duty statuses with six broader statuses. Building on that framework, DoD now seeks to consolidate the reserve duty status system into four categories.

The first category is contingency duty, which covers deployments and mobilizations where reservists and National Guard members are called to serve, usually involuntarily, for combat operations and other missions where the military requires additional manpower. The category is divided into two authorities — Title 10, which applies to reservists, and Title 32, which applies to National Guard members.

The second category applies to training and support assignments. These can include attending a training course, participating in large-scale exercises, or performing duties in support of home units. Like contingency duty, this category is split into Title 10 and Title 32 designations.

The third category, called reserve component duty, is what is most commonly associated with traditional reserve service — the one weekend a month, two weeks a year model. This category has both Title 10 and Title 32 versions.

The fourth category is remote assignments, designed to account for duty that can be performed away from a unit, such as online courses or training completed at home.

“Those 30 existing statutes that are out there — we mapped each of those to each of these four categories. In some cases, we had to split some things off, and then we undertook the process of looking at what’s underneath those categories and what’s underneath those statutes. For each of those categories, can we come up with a way to rationalize, to make consistent pay, benefits, the way members are called. Can we do that so that everyone under a category one sort of duty would be paid relatively the same way,” Harrington said.

“That took quite a bit of work to think about how to do that, and to think about where there are differences, and even to go back in history and understand why those differences were there. What was the original intent when the statute was developed? What were the considerations? Whether it was for fairness, whether it was for retention purposes. We had to sort of peel apart all of those and then put it all back together under the categories,” she added.

Under the current system, for instance, members who volunteer for an assignment receive different pay and benefits than members who are called involuntarily. They’re activated under different statutes, and each of those carries with it different pay and benefits. 

“You could end up with the case where two people serving in a contingency-like environment, one of them went there as a volunteer and potentially receives less than the person who went there involuntarily. So you set up this problem where people will say, ‘No, I’m not going to volunteer. You make me go,’” Harrington said.

“Under our categories, contingency is contingency, whether you volunteered to go or you involuntarily agreed to go, everyone receives the same pay and benefits. It could be years, but we would hope that reserves and National Guard members in the future would just say, I’m on category one duty. And everyone will know what that means and it will be well understood — the pay and benefits and the ways that people are on that category one duty,” she added.

Overall, the reform would mean expanded and more consistent benefits, particularly for National Guard members serving under Title 32, who would be brought closer in line with their Reserve counterparts. A key selling point, Harrington said, is that reservists would no longer have to worry about losing TRICARE or other benefits simply because their orders changed.

But the potential cost of the reform is one of the main concerns.

“While we did some historical analysis to look at costs, even today, we’re seeing a reserve component be used in new and expanded, somewhat expanded ways in current events and so thinking about how those will play out in the future, and predicting what cost might be is very difficult,” Harrington said

“The costs we think are not something that would stop the reform from happening when people understand exactly how the costs play out,” she added.

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