The Victors

Some of our Reservists are assigned to active duty units, and come on periodically to cover when people are out, or there's a surge in work. Called Individual Mobilization Augmentees, or IMAs. They may be assigned to an office near where they live, or they may work somewhere else. If it's somewhere else, the travel and lodging will get funded, or they can work out a telework thing. Now, in 2025, with the big "we hate telework" push, they nixed telework in most instances, then came up with a half-assed work-around that if you just found an office near you and went in there, you could telework from there because it wasn't telework. Sure, why not? What problems is this all solving? your guess is as good as mine.

Half their days for the year are calls IDTs (don't worry about what that standards for). Suddenly, last week, the DoD Office of General Counsel puts out an opinion saying that, both in terms of statutory and regulatory authority, we can't actually fund lodging for IDTs. So if a member has to travel for their IDTs, they can't get reimbursed for lodging. Which, you know, is a problem for them. They put this out as an "effective immediately" thing, which meant that people who were currently working IDTs, or had worked them but weren't yet paid, were set not to get reimbursed. Which is, you know, insane.

This led to a flurry of emails, teleconferences, and generalized freak-outs. This was a particularly big issue for me because my sole backfill is my IMA, who lives in DC. And given that I work in a SCIF, a lot of what I do isn't really amenable to telework (at least if you don't want to violate several dozen laws). So, if I want to take any meaningful leave the next two years, figuring this out is a problem.

Luckily, DoD OGC was On It. In that they just put out a statement saying "haha, j/k, that wasn't an official opinion, continue as you were."

Mind you, DoD OGC is the top legal office in the DoD. Lots of experienced civilian attorneys (and political appointees, including the OGC), generally involved in policy, so they don't usually just pull stuff out of their ass. Usually.

Unclear what this was even supposed to even be or for or why it happened. Just masterful job of screwing shit up and then walking it back. You could've just not done any of this in the first place.