During a House Appropriations Committee hearing prior to the congressional recess, Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-OK) questioned Master Chief Petty Officer James M. Honea of the Navy about childcare services for service members.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Thank you Mr. Chairman and thank you gentlemen for being with us this afternoon. I keep hearing
00:09the phrase from my military friends on time and on target. Well my time is only five minutes so if
00:15you could keep your answers fairly short that would be really helpful. To be respectful of my
00:19colleagues who still have questions they'd like to ask. Master Chief I want to start with you.
00:24My colleague and I, Chrissy Humlihan, worked to extend parental leave for our
00:30service members and we realized that sometimes it is a challenge for our
00:35service members to be able to take that leave within a one-year time frame. We
00:39are looking to extend that to a two-year time frame. Could you talk a little bit
00:43about the benefit that your service members could have by extending that
00:47time and how it would be easier for you to manage the workflow?
00:51Congresswoman, I appreciate the question but I really appreciate your
00:55willingness to engage into this conversation because I do believe that
01:00if we could expand that to two years or at least have some conversation we could
01:04figure out how to get there it would be extremely beneficial. It's it's very
01:08challenging for someone to execute parental leave on top of their normal leave
01:14that they accrue their year all with inside that one year. So that flexibility
01:20would be helpful. It would be extremely helpful. There you go. I'll be succinct.
01:22Thank you. Thank you. Everyone agree with that that the two-year time frame would
01:26be helpful to being able to manage that workflow. I see a lot of heads nodding.
01:31Thank you for that. I want to say Chief Master Flossie thank you for the phone
01:37call. We had a great conversation. We talked a lot about infrastructure and one of
01:41the things that you alerted me to was that you have a lot of buildings that are
01:47currently vacant. Twelve hundred to be exact. Is that correct? And my
01:53understanding is that the DOD demolition budget is seventy five million dollars
01:57for all of the branches. Is that correct? Ma'am that sounds accurate. Do all of the
02:03branches have maybe not Space Force since they're fairly new but do all of you have
02:08buildings that are currently vacant that you would like to have as part of a
02:11demolition project that cannot because the funding is not there? Sergeant Major? We do
02:17Congresswoman. Yes ma'am. Yes. I think that we need to highlight that because what
02:22happens is it was mentioned earlier there's a ten-to-one return on
02:25investment for demolishing these buildings. It's taking I believe resources away
02:32from your branches to be able to upkeep these facilities so that you can
02:38actually perform your missions and so I want to encourage our folks that we're
02:43when we're looking at our appropriations package to potentially increase that so
02:47that we can raise some of these buildings take the workload off of your
02:51plates and allow us to continue to really focus on the mission at hand. Let me
02:58pivot slightly Chief Master Sergeant Flossie and or Master Chief Honey you
03:05talked a little bit about child care and that's something that I know I've been
03:09interested in. I had the opportunity to do a bipartisan sort of swap with my
03:16colleague Sarah Jacobs from San Diego and there were two things that really were
03:22eye-opening to me in visiting her district and that is it's expensive to
03:27live in San Diego if you're a service member and there was virtually no child
03:30care opportunities for those service members that are living on on base. Can
03:35you talk a little bit about you talked that you mentioned in your testimony that
03:38the you have the highest number of you know sort of individuals that are using
03:44child care services on naval installations currently. We need to continue to work at
03:49that but is there something different that you've done to get those numbers up and
03:52then if Chief Master Flossie wants to expand on that. Congresswoman yes one of
04:00the things that we've done to really draw down on our our wait list besides
04:05building the facilities and staffing them is that we really are encouraging the
04:10use of fee assistance and allowing our service members to find adequate child care
04:15in the community so that we're not continually fighting with the with the local
04:19community for the same staffing. That is that's quickly alleviated a lot of our
04:26our wait list and it's helped us solve this problem much quicker.
04:29Perfect. Chief Master. Thank you ma'am. Similar similar in the Air Force we we have first of
04:36all improved staffing which which is really one of our constraints sometimes
04:40it's not a capacity problem with infrastructure it's it's staffing and we've
04:44gone from 72 percent to 86 percent staffed across the Air Force in the last three
04:48fiscal years and doing no small part to some of the reimbursement incentives
04:53that we're able to offer now all employees it used to be direct care only
04:57but we have a hundred percent reimbursement rate for child care for the for a
05:00dependent of one of our employees in child care facility so that's great and I
05:04think we were implementing that across all services now. The community-based
05:08child care fee assistance we've got 7.8 thousand children enrolled in those
05:12community-based fee assistance which is a great force multiplier for us and it's
05:17win-win for our local communities where we can we can help with the local economy
05:22by by supporting the local economies in which our airmen live and work and it
05:27also that that fee assistance and to the tune for the Air Force is around 33
05:31million dollars last year so providing that incentive provides our airmen the
05:36ability to seek quality care that's equivalent to on base when we do have
05:41constraints with our CDC's been really helpful we have over 400 homes in the
05:45family child care program and our our Air Force offsets the fees and
05:51certification process for service members families to get certified to watch
05:56children in their own home so another win-win with spousal employment as well
06:01as child care for your own family primary care provider keeping their family in and
06:05and it helps with our 24 7 mission for our airmen that work off three hours thank
06:10you for that I appreciate your succinct comments and with that mr.
06:14chairman I yield thank you