Anxiety, fear and paralysis: Being a military family in the era of government shutdowns

By Brianna Keilar, CNN

(CNN) — As military families lurch from one pay day to the next, they’re suffering collective anxiety, unsure if paychecks will arrive as the government shutdown passes a month with no signs of resolution.

Just days ahead of pay day, the Trump administration has shifted Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security funds and accepted an ethically dubious private donation to ensure that service members receive their upcoming paychecks.

A welcome last-minute reprieve from missing mortgage payments or defaulting on medical or credit card bills is still not a respite from the stress of anticipating and preparing for impending financial hardship.

“People panic, people worry about paying bills,” says Coast Guard spouse Jessica Manfre, who is a senior case advisor for Coast Guard Mutual Assistance, an organization that provides financial support and other assistance for the service’s families. “There’s rent to be paid, there’s mortgages to be paid. You can’t avoid the bills, right? So there’s definitely the feeling of ‘what do we do next?’”

Many military families are visiting food banks and stocking up on items, worried they soon won’t be able to afford them.

CNN’s Jeff Zeleny recently spoke with spouses of service members as they visited a mobile food bank in Hampton Roads, Virginia.

“It can start to become a real stressful situation and a real struggle,” Kady Frazier, who is married to a Navy technician, told Zeleny, holding her toddler as she waited to step into the food bank.

“I don’t really understand why it keeps happening and why we can’t just keep the government up and running.”

Broadly speaking, the military community is already a financially vulnerable one, facing a persistent food insecurity crisis long before the shutdown. A quarter of active duty families face food insecurity, according to a 2023 study by the Military Family Advisory Network.

“That one in four is definitely spiking right now with the government shutdown,” Monica Bassett, the founder and CEO of Stronghold Food Pantry, told CNN earlier this month.

“The spike has shown us that there is a high percentage of military families that have a very thin margin of additional funds to get them from one paycheck to the other.”

At the same time, the Department of Agriculture says it will not use its $6 billion contingency fund to cover SNAP benefits, the program previously known for providing support in the form of food stamps, which are set to expire at the end of the month. Some military families rely on that support to prevent hunger even while receiving paychecks.

For many military families who have children with complex medical problems, the government shutdown has already resulted in significant unforeseen expenses.

“Military treatment facilities are telling us that they’re unable to order some of the medications that families are needing,” said Austin Carrigg, an active duty Army spouse and CEO of Exceptional Families of the Military, a nonprofit supporting military families with members who have special medical or educational needs.

Carrigg said those families are going to civilian pharmacies where they’re charged co-pays they would not be responsible for at military hospitals.

“A handful of families that we’ve spoken with are so paralyzed with fear that they haven’t (prepared) because they can’t figure out where to start,” she said.

Managing those expenses without a paycheck would be impossible for some families, like one military spouse who went viral for calling into C-SPAN not long after the shutdown began to confront House Speaker Mike Johnson as he appeared as a guest on the network.

“I have two medically fragile children, and I have a husband who actively serves this country. He suffers from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) from his two tours in Afghanistan. If we see a lapse in pay (…) my children do not get the medication that’s needed for them to live their life,” the spouse, who identified herself as Samantha, a Republican from Fort Belvoir, Virginia, desperately pleaded.

“I am begging you to pass this legislation. My kids could die. We don’t have the credit because of the medical bills that I have to pay regularly,” she said.

The anxiety military families feel about the prospect of a missed paycheck is compounded by the military spouse unemployment crisis.

Though half of active duty spouses have attained at least a bachelor’s degree, their unemployment rate is 20%, almost five times the national average.

Frequent moves – often every two to three years – stifle the ability of military spouses to find a job or maintain a career in the field in which they are trained.

A significant number of spouses have also been recently fired from federal jobs, after multiple administrations marketed the federal workforce as the employer of choice for military spouses and offered remote work options that helped spouses needing to move with service members. President Donald Trump even signed an executive order to increase military spouse hiring.

Others who survived Department of Government Efficiency cuts during Trump’s second term now find themselves furloughed from their jobs or working without pay.

Taken together, the challenges of military life and the effects of the shutdown have pushed some military families to their breaking points.

On its website, Blue Star Families, the nation’s leading nonprofit serving military and veteran families (of which, full disclosure, I am a member of the board) is directing military families to partner organizations that can provide no-cost counseling.

“This is a disaster for many families, and it’s a disaster both financially, but it also has a psychological impact to put your life on the line, to accept government orders no matter what, and to be at risk of not being paid for the essential work that you’re doing,” Blue Star Families co-founder and CEO Kathy Roth Duquet told CNN’s John Berman this month.

The organization is hearing from hundreds of military families who are less likely to recommend military service to others because of the government shutdown, raising questions about a potential national security impact of this impasse between Congress and Trump.

As America risks breaking its covenant with service members – to meet their basic needs and those of their family members so they can focus on protecting the country – it shouldn’t be surprising. In a nation that relies on an all-volunteer force, it should be beyond alarming.

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