Surviving spouses of service members who died on active duty or of a service-connected disability would gain access to a job counseling program created for veterans under a bipartisan Senate proposal being introduced Wednesday.
The bill, from Sens. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., and Bill Cassidy, R-La., would allow surviving spouses to get career counseling from specialists within the Department of Labor’s Disabled Veterans Outreach Program, or DVOP.
“After the terrible loss of a service member, we must do everything that we can to support their families,” Hassan said in a statement to Military.com ahead of the bill’s release. “This bipartisan bill is a commonsense way to help address the challenges that surviving spouses can face in their careers, and we must continue working to support our service members and their families.”
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DVOP, which is housed within the Veterans’ Employment and Training Service at the Department of Labor, supplies grants for states to hire specialists who can provide individualized career placement services for veterans with significant barriers to employment.
The program provided specialists to 93% of the more than 44,000 veterans who received help from the Department of Labor’s Jobs for Veterans State Grants Program in the 2022 program year, according to the department. The grant program overall had a 56.6% employment rate at the…
