FedFam

☀️ Good morning Fam!! June 18, 2026. 104 days until end of fiscal year.

A notable split between the House and Senate on military pay, with implications for how the whole tiered-pay idea plays out.

📍 The Senate Armed Services Committee released its 2027 defense policy bill this week proposing a flat 3.6% across-the-board pay raise for all service members. That sets up a direct clash with the House, which backed the White House's tiered approach of 5% to 7% depending on rank, with the largest 7% bump going to junior enlisted troops at E-5 and below.

📍 The disagreement is about more than the number. The Senate's flat raise is a rejection of the tiered model the administration has been pushing. The Defense Department's own Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation warned that pay compression, where junior and senior pay scales bunch together, can weaken the incentive to seek promotion and to perform above the minimum. The House and White House say targeting junior enlisted raises addresses real hardship at the bottom of the pay scale. Reasonable arguments on both sides, and now they have to be reconciled.

📍 The Senate bill also boosts a range of bonuses and special pays: aviator bonuses up to $60,000 from $50,000, senior ROTC cadet and midshipman bonuses up to $15,000 from $5,000, hostile fire pay up to $600 a month from $450, and imminent danger pay up to $400 from $275.

📍 Why this matters for the broader federal community. The military pay fight is unfolding while civilian federal employees face a proposed pay freeze for 2027. The contrast is stark: Congress is debating whether troops get 3.6% or up to 7%, while the civilian workforce is fighting just to avoid zero. Both groups serve. Only one is in the conversation for a raise right now.

📍 The bill authorizes $1.15 trillion in spending and now heads to the Senate floor, where it still has to be negotiated against the House version before anything is final.

We will track how the House-Senate difference gets resolved and what the final numbers look like.

☀️ Good morning Fam!! June 16, 2026. 106 days until end of fiscal year.

The people fighting one of the worst Ebola outbreaks on record are doing it short-staffed and running on empty. This is what that looks like inside the CDC.

📍 The CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, the center responsible for diseases like anthrax and Ebola, is leading the US response to an outbreak that recent CDC analyses suggest could become the worst on record. There are already more than 800 confirmed cases and 180 deaths, concentrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. Domestically, CDC staff are screening for Ebola at several airports.

📍 They are doing it while depleted. The CDC has cut roughly 27% of its staff since fiscal 2024. In an internal all-staff survey of 340 NCEZID employees, half rated their personal workplace morale as “somewhat low” or “very low.” Staffing and budget were the dominant concerns, named in nearly 40% of responses, with fear of further RIFs a close second.

📍 Leadership at the top of the CDC is largely absent. The agency has no permanent director, with NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya overseeing it on an interim basis past the legal limit for an acting role. A former center director said more than 80% of CDC center directors are currently acting officials, calling it “a patchwork of absences” that leaves gaps in the disease-detective work the agency exists to do.

📍 And here is the line that captures this whole community. Despite everything, about 90% of surveyed employees said they are proud of the work NCEZID does. One wrote it plainly: “High morale for the nature of the work; low morale for the difficult organizational constraints for doing it.”

📍 Officials expect the response to last another 6 to 12 months. As one division director told staff, it will be “a marathon.” A former CDC leader put the deeper risk bluntly: a public health workforce cannot be rebuilt overnight. “Preparedness depends on people. You can have plans on paper, but without experienced epidemiologists, data teams, field staff, it collapses when it’s most needed.”

That pride in the mission, even under impossible constraints, is the whole story of the federal workforce right now. To the people doing this work: we see you, and we are grateful.