It seems like long ago. Thousands of active duty service members applied for religious exemptions from COVID vaccines. Now we know how well the armed services did in processing the exemptions and the discharges of service members from the armed services. For details, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked to Project Manager Marie Godwin in the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General.

Interview Transcript: 

Marie Godwin We wanted to ensure that service members were treated fairly, and that their exemption requests and discharges were processed in accordance with the law and DoD regulations. And we also received a number of hotline complaints alleging that the military services were improperly processing religious accommodation requests. So we wanted to review that process and determine if those allegations had any merit. So specifically, the complaints were alleging that the military services were processing the requests too quickly and not performing individualized review of the requests as required by the law and DoD policy. But in the end, we found the allegations did not jibe with our findings, and our report confirms that those allegations were, in fact, unfounded.

Tom Temin All right. Do the requirements on the DoD specify a timeline or a period of time in which they have to decide these? Usually the problem is the government gets backlogs of things. In this case they were processing them. It sounds like efficiently.

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Marie Godwin Yes, the DoD does establish time requirements, and the time requirement depends on if the service requires a waiver of policy for that religious accommodation request or not. So for the Army, Marine Corps and Navy, they had 90 days to process the requests. The Air Force had 30 days to process the requests because they had decentralized decision process that did not require a waiver of policy.

Tom Temin You didn’t look then at whether the discharges or the exemptions were correct or not. It was just simply looking at whether they were processed in a way that was in accordance with their policy for processing them.

Marie Godwin That’s correct.

Tom Temin All right. Let’s go into that a little bit further. You said the Army, Navy, Marine Corps had a 90 day policy and the Air Force 30 days, maybe a little bit more detail on why that was the case, that variance.

Marie Godwin Sure. That’s just an overarching DoD policy that establishes the time requirements. And the DoD policy says that if the religious accommodation request requires a waiver of department policy, then it can be processed within 90 days. And I think the thought behind that is that it takes longer to process that through a central decision authority. If the request does not require a waiver of policy, as is the case with the Air Force, then the time requirement for that processing is only 30 days.

Tom Temin In what’s involved in processing that even takes 30 days?

Marie Godwin Sure. There’s a number of things that happen in the process, and it differs by military service. But generally, the service member submits a request. They have recommendations from their chain of command. They meet with a military chaplain to discuss their request. There’s also medical subject matter expert recommendations, and all these are processed up through the decision authority to consider.

Tom Temin Right. And just to clarify once more. You didn’t look at the quality of the decisions versus, yeah, you can stay or you’re discharged. But again, just whether they were processed in the proper manner.

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Marie Godwin Right. So we looked at did they have all of the required recommendations? And was the proper decision authority deciding on their request?

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Marie Godwin. She’s a project manager in the Inspector General’s Office at the Defense Department. So generally, everything went according to each armed service’s policy for getting those things processed. Any exceptions or any outlying issues that you discovered?

Marie Godwin So for religious accommodation requests, we found that the Army and Air Force were taking much longer to process the exemptions than the DoD time requirements. So the Army, as we said before, had 90 days to process those requests, and they were averaging about 192 days to process the requests. The Air Force had 30 days to process those requests, and they were averaging about 168 days.

Tom Temin Yikes. And do we know why it took so long to do those?

Marie Godwin Well, we spoke with the military personnel involved in processing religious accommodation requests, and they told us that in a typical year, they only receive 3 or 4 requests for religious accommodation. So they were just overwhelmed by the sheer number of the requests.

Tom Temin  And could be that the religious exemption has maybe more subtle decision making that’s required. It’s hard to tell, that sounds like a tough one. Maybe they’re afraid to make the call in some cases.

Marie Godwin Well, I think they just wanted to take the time to make the correct decision and make sure that it was an informed decision.

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Tom Temin All right. So what recommendations do you have then? Sounds like they would be centering around the religious exemption request because that’s what caused the outlying cases.

Marie Godwin So we had three recommendations. We had one for religious accommodation requests, one for medical and administrative exemptions and one for discharges. So for religious accommodation requests, we recommended that the DoD issued new guidance for periods of high volume request to decrease processing times. Military personnel told us that they only receive a few requests per year, and under those conditions, the existing policies were sufficient, but not in periods of high volume requests. So this recommendation aims to improve the processing time so that service members are not significantly impacted while they’re awaiting a decision.

Tom Temin All right. And what about for the medical and administrative? Recommendations there?

Marie Godwin Sure. We recommended that the DoD require personnel to document exemption approvals in service members personnel records. We had found that they weren’t always being documented in their records, so we anticipate that requirement will reduce the risk of errors and ensure that the service members vaccination status is accurate in the medical readiness systems.

Tom Temin And for the discharge petitions. That means that people want to be released from the military rather than have the vaccine. That’s what that particular application is.

Marie Godwin Correct. So we recommended that the DoD require uniform discharge types and reentry codes for all service members who were discharged for vaccination refusal. And we made that recommendation because of the DoD does not issue uniform discharge types and reentry codes, then service members will experience different impacts to their educational benefits and eligibility to re-enlist.

Tom Temin I was going to say reentry codes. Does that mean that there’s like a revolving door over vaccinations? You can be discharged and then come back?

Marie Godwin Well, when a service member leaves military service, they’re issued a certificate of release from active duty service. And that lists your discharge type and your reentry code. And the reentry code just indicates a service members eligibility to re-enlist in the service later. So we found that some service members received reentry codes that required them to obtain a waiver to re-enlist, while other service members receive codes that banned re-enlistment altogether.

Tom Temin Got it. And so the recommendation there was or did you have any for that particular class of application.

Marie Godwin So we recommended that they have uniform discharge types and uniform reentry codes.

Tom Temin Got it. And did the department say yeah we agree.

Marie Godwin They actually did not agree with that recommendation. But they provided another plan to address the recommendation. So once they provide that plan to us, we’ll reevaluate the recommendation.

Tom Temin This is more than history then. Because should another type of pandemic happen in the country, or we have another one of these situations where mass vaccinations become the general mode of the land, this could come up again.

Marie Godwin You’re absolutely right. And so DoD allows service members to request medical or administrative exemptions from any vaccination, not just COVID 19.

Tom Temin It could be measles, mumps or polio for that matter.

Marie Godwin Right. The military services have a list of ten or so required vaccinations for all service members.

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