EDITOR’S NOTE: Service members and veterans who are in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, or those who know a service member or veteran in crisis, can call the Veterans/Military Crisis Line for confidential support available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Call 988 and Press 1, text 838225 or chat online at
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GRAND FORKS — A cold-weather pay bonus for military personnel stationed in frigid climates promised in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act has yet to reach Grand Forks airmen’s bank accounts. Now, North Dakota’s two senators are imploring the Air Force to expedite the payments.
Republican Sens. John Hoeven and Kevin Cramer joined Sens. Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski, both Alaska Republicans, in a March 5 letter to the secretary of the Air Force outlining some of the additional costs incurred by military personnel in cold climates. Those additional expenses — for heavy winter gear, snow tires, snow blowers, engine block heaters and more — are “not just nice to have, they are necessities.”
“This financial burden is unique to the north and has second- and third-order effects beyond a service member’s bank account,” the letter reads. “Should an airmen or guardian feel financially unable to appropriately equip themselves or their families for a healthy lifestyle outside of work and during the winter season, they are likely to favor more sedentary activities indoors, which can lead to increased depression and suicidal ideations. Providing additional funds for our airmen and guardians in cold-weather locations – installations that the department directed they be assigned – is not likely to solve the department’s suicide problem, but it will assuredly help.”
The NDAA, signed into law in December 2022, defines cold-weather locations as duty stations where the temperature is expected to drop below minus-20 degrees. In North Dakota, that’s the Grand Forks Air Force Base, the Minot Air Force Base and the Cavalier Space Force Station. Duty stations throughout Alaska and Montana also qualify.
That qualifying language was not included in the 2022 version of the law that was passed, leading to some uncertainty in Grand Forks about whether the GFAFB would qualify for the additional payments of $300 per month. That language was added to the 2024 version of the law.
Hoeven told the Herald he hopes the change will expedite the payments to local service members and eliminate uncertainty about which bases will be included.
The senators have not yet received any response from the Air Force. Cramer said it’s not clear what’s holding up the payments, but his best guess is that the answer is military bureaucracy.
“For whatever reason — and I don’t know why it would be so difficult — but it just is,” Cramer said. “I’m not making an excuse for them. I’ll wait to hear from them exactly why. But my guess is it’s just some bureaucratic hangup. And so we just want to encourage them along.”
Cramer’s office noted that the law’s original intent was “to make it easier, not harder, for service members and their families to live and thrive in North Dakota, Alaska and Montana.” In his view, it amounts to a quality-of-life issue, he said.
Grand Forks Air Force Base closely tracks suicidal ideation as well as completed suicides among local airmen, but the base generally does not publicly release those numbers in an effort to avoid the risk of a cluster of suicides in response, said Lea Greene, a spokesperson for the base.
However, a Department of Defense report provided by GFAFB shows that in 2022, the U.S. military had a suicide rate of 25.1 per 100,000 active service members. Those numbers rose steadily between 2011 and 2020 and have appeared slightly lower since then.
Behavioral health diagnoses and relationship problems are the leading contributors to military suicides, the report says. Financial issues were found to be contributing stressors in 10% of suicides.
To Thomas Slaughter, a consultant who has helped Grand Forks airmen balance their budgets for more than 20 years, the connection between financial stress and mental health is an obvious one.
“Finances bring on stress,” Slaughter said. “If you don’t open your mouth and reach out to someone to take care of that budget, to take care of that credit card debt that’s out of control, it takes you over.”
According to the Air Force’s 2024 pay scale, when an enlisted member joins the Air Force, their starting pay is $1,865 per month. After four months, that number increases to $2,017.20. Enlisted members’ pay increases each following year.
For very young airmen — many still in their teens or early 20s — who are often asked to find housing in Grand Forks, living expenses add up quickly. That’s especially true during winter, when heating bills can run up into the hundreds of dollars, Slaughter said.
The Air Force provides additional money to help offset some of those expenses, and there is additional aid available for airmen who are struggling financially, he said. Still, the extra $300 per month expected through the cold-weather payments stands to benefit a huge swath of young airmen, he said.
“I think that will be enough for them to focus on their heating bills, and try to build up their emergency fund,” he said. “A lot of times, these young people don’t have an emergency fund because there’s no money left over to build an emergency fund. So what are you going to do if you have an emergency? If you have a credit card, you’re going to swipe it, and that’s when you start to get into trouble.”