National Guard bonus debate steeped in electoral politics

WASHINGTON—A Pentagon announcement Wednesday that it is suspending the recouping of excessive bonuses from National Guard personnel has only slightly cooled the congressional clamor to take prompt action to let virtually all the service members keep the money.

Never mind that Congress has known for years about the issue and has until now managed to avoid addressing it. And never mind, for now anyway, that many of those who netted thousands of dollars knew they were not entitled to it.

Some 2,000 National Guard members, mostly from California, were found to have been overpaid reenlistment bonuses and other incentives, often a decade ago, as the Pentagon sought to boost its wartime ranks at the time, said Air Force Gen. Joseph Lengyel, the National Guard Bureau chief, at a press breakfast Wednesday. Previously reported estimates had put the number of those ordered to repay bonuses at 10,000.

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter announced Wednesday that the Pentagon will suspend efforts to recoup those funds—estimated at nearly $50 million—until the department’s brass comes up with a more streamlined way to review the 2,000 cases, plus more than 3,000 others that have yet to be adjudicated. Carter set a Jan. 1 deadline for creating the new review process.

But members of Congress appear uninterested in mending how the Pentagon decides who should pay it back and how much. In most cases, they prefer to essentially end the so-called “clawback” of funds.

Few members of Congress are making much publicly of the fact that some of the military personnel who received money—a minority, Lengyel said—may have known full well that they were not supposed to.

The Pentagon has a process, albeit a slow one, for separating those who unwittingly received the funds from those who fraudulently accepted them, Lengyel said.

But politicians on both sides of the aisle were not focused on that nuanced point—not with less than two weeks to go until Election Day.

As a result, it appears all but given now that Congress will by year’s end send the president legislation that would permit virtually all those who received overpayments to keep them. The defense authorization bill now in conference is one possible vehicle for such a measure, as is the new continuing resolution that will have to be advanced in December, or more likely an omnibus spending bill.

Some on Capitol Hill do not believe they need to pass legislation to resolve the problem. They believe the executive branch has the authority it needs to administratively exonerate overpaid guardsmen.

Indeed, when survivors of some guardsmen killed in the line of duty were found to have received larger benefit checks than they were entitled to under the rules, the Pentagon did not demand repayment of the overage. Instead, officials simply stopped paying too much going forward.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said this week that the California Guard snafu shows how “incompetent” the government is.

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, called for legislation “to right this wrong.”