In a memorandum published Wednesday, the Defense Department directed the military departments to look at how their services could reduce their discretionary permanent change of station move budgets as a way to increase geographic stability to families, increase department efficiency and reduce costs for the department.
Earlier this month, a survey of military spouses cited PCS moves as one of the biggest reasons for dissatisfaction with military life.
"We understand how disruptive PCS moves can be," said Tim Dill, who is performing the duties of the deputy undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. "There are many aspects to that challenge and that disruption. One of the biggest ones is military spouses' employment — when they often have the need to find a new job at their gaining location and sometimes, they end up underemployed at that location."
Following a PCS move, Dill said, families also need to find new homes, new schools for their children and rebuild a life.
"They're displaced from the community of support that they've developed over the years in their previous duty station," he said. "All of those concerns can be effectively addressed by examining when the department does not need to move a service member and their family to accomplish the mission."
The department gave the military departments about four months to conduct a review of how they might go about reducing their PCS budgets, and how they also would modify career pathways for service members for whom some PCS moves are part of career development.
"The memo directs the military departments to spend 120 days reviewing their PCS budgets and to consider how they would pursue future reductions to those budgets and develop holistic and comprehensive implementation plans for those proposed changes," Dill said.
The memorandum asks military departments to propose a plan for reducing their discretionary PCS budgets by as much as 50% by fiscal year 2030, based on their fiscal year 2026 budget, Dill said. This means service members could be asked to move far less often.
"There [are] certain functions where in order to continue on your career track, you must go obtain certain accreditation or additional training ... something that corresponds with your increase in rank," Dill said, offering scenarios that might qualify as a mandatory PCS like a career change that would require a move to a different duty station.
In other cases, he said, there are critical missions that must be fully manned, and moving a service member to fill a role there would also be mandatory.
But other moves might not need to happen, Dill said.
"We estimate that about 80% of [military department] PCS moves are in a discretionary category, and 20% are mandatory," he said. "What we're directing the [military] departments to do is purely to examine potential reductions in things that would be defined as discretionary. So, if they see as mandatory for mission need, we're not even asking them to come back with a plan to reduce it. We want them to continue that course of action and do the mandatory moves."
A big part of the direction from the secretary, Dill said, is that while reducing PCS moves and associated costs, the military departments must maintain mission readiness.
"[We] have issued direction to the departments to come back with plans for how they think they could best achieve those reductions while ensuring that they continue to prioritize the mission and the development of service members," Dill said.
Considerations there, Dill said, include how moves, if they happen, can be done more efficiently and also how to provide service members with career-broadening and leadership opportunities that do not require PCS.
Right now, the department has directed the military departments to develop plans for their services to reduce their PCS budgets by half. But Dill said there will be ongoing discussions about what kind of cuts are appropriate for each military department.
"On top of being efficient from a fiscal perspective, the other goal of this policy, as a people-driven policy, is to ensure that this works well for service members and their families," he said. "So that is one of our primary goals in the policy, to ensure it works well."
Dill also said the DOD understands there needs to be discussions on how proposed cuts could negatively impact service members, their families and mission readiness. And when those concerns are expressed, the department will listen and adjust.
"We haven't directed that any specific course of action must be implemented," Dill said. "We look forward to having that conversation and figuring out how we can do this best."