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Association president to join House sponsors at Capitol Hill press conference
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Jan. 7, 2026) — Retired Maj. Gen. Francis M. McGinn, the NGAUS president, will join Reps. Gil Cisneros, D-Calif., and Jack Bergman, R-Mich., tomorrow (Jan. 8) at 10 a.m. at the House Triangle for a press conference to celebrate the introduction of the Duty Status Reform Act.
Cisneros and Bergman are members of the House Armed Services Committee.
(Please contact Taylor Deacon, Cisneros’ communications director at 202-650-7624 or [email protected] to cover the press conference.)
McGinn calls Duty Status Reform a “long-overdue step forward for the National Guard and Reserves, and the nation.”
“This legislation streamlines an overly complex system of more than 30 duty statuses into four categories, cleans up nearly 300 laws, saves taxpayer dollars and requires no additional Congressoinal Budget Office scoring,” he said. “We are grateful to Reps. Cisneros and Bergman for leading this charge and we look forward to working with Congress to accomplish this much needed reform.”
The National Guard and Reserves today must navigate a complicated duty-status system created piecemeal over generations. It results in confusion for service members, administrative burden for commanders, and disruptions in pay and health care.
“That the system no longer matched how the Guard and Reserve are used has been known for many years, but it has taken a while to develop the comprehensive legislative fix required,” McGinn said.
Congress first directed the U.S. military to address the situation in the fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act. The Duty Status Reform Act is a product of countless hours of work by Pentagon officials in consultation with Guard and Reserve leaders nationwide, McGinn said.
“When statuses are clear, pay is timely, health care coverage is continuous and commanders can focus on the mission instead of paperwork,” he added. “That will be the result of this legislation.”
Reporters, Editors & Producers: Retired Maj. Gen. Francis M. McGinn is available for interviews or to appear as a subject matter expert on issues related to the National Guard. Contact John Goheen at 202-408-5882 to schedule an interview or appearance.
About NGAUS: The association includes nearly 45,000 current or former Guard officers. It was created in 1878 to provide unified National Guard representation in Washington. In their first productive meeting after Reconstruction, militia officers from the North and South formed the association with the goal of obtaining better equipment and training by educating
