WASHINGTON — As the government shutdown stretches on, military advocates are warning of long-lasting effects to National Guard troops and their readiness, while the military services are grappling with an inability to fully discharge active duty service members.
“The shutdown has been uniquely hard on the 433,000 Army and Air National Guardsmen,” Francis McGinn, president of the National Guard Association, told reporters Monday.
The Trump administration has made a public effort of blunting the impact on active duty service members by moving money around to ensure they have received two paychecks since the shutdown began on Oct. 1. But McGinn said more than 30,000 technicians — full-time civilian government employees who also serve in uniform — have not been paid since the end of September.
These technicians, National Guard members who typically carry out training for their units or maintain equipment, “are critical to our day-to-day operations and generating readiness,” McGinn said.
Adding to the pressures, the Trump administration has sent National Guard troops to patrol the streets of several major U.S. cities, including more than 2,300 deployed to Washington, D.C.
The “damage” also goes beyond paychecks and into more than a month of canceled school, training and maintenance opportunities that troops will struggle to make up when the government reopens, said John Hashem, executive director of Reserve Organization of America, an advocacy group for Guard and Reserve troops.
“It’s not just, ‘We’ll pick it up next month,’ it’s that we are in turmoil now — I just can’t throw you back into school if I had to take you out of it. I just can’t get you ready for the next exercise because now, probably, the exercise has been changed entirely,” Hashem said.
McGinn added that “there’s just thousands and thousands of hours” of vehicle and aircraft maintenance that National Guard troops are going to have to catch up on.
Hashem and McGinn said they also worry about the impact the shutdown will have on morale and retention. McGinn said the technicians especially feel “completely demoralized” and “betrayed by the government.”
At the same time, the military is facing a growing number of active duty troops who need to be discharged but no one to generate the formal documents needed to certify the end of their service.
The Air Force is “legally prohibited from obligating the government for costs associated with some voluntary and administrative separations happening in November,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
A Navy official confirmed that a form with details about a person’s service, including length, job specialties and awards earned, can’t be finalized and final pay can’t be released.
The form is crucial in the process because it signifies the formal end of service and attests to the kind of discharge a service member received — a key factor in determining eligibility for benefits like the GI Bill or Department of Veterans Affairs disability pay.
Both the Navy and Air Force said they were allowing affected service members to opt in to a temporary extension of their service to wait out the shutdown and ensure they don’t experience gaps in pay or benefits.
An Army official said “soldiers in their separation window within 45 days will be affected by the lapse in appropriations and the government shutdown” but wouldn’t confirm whether the service was offering voluntary or involuntary extensions.
The officials from the three branches spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The Marine Corps did not respond to questions on effects from the shutdown, citing the government closure.
Burt Field, head of the Air & Space Forces Association, called for legislation to prevent future shutdowns from affecting military pay. After the government reopens, Congress should “pass a bill that doesn’t allow this to happen again for our military service members, civilians and Americans,” he told reporters Monday.
