EFMP families don’t get one PCS move, they get three

When orders drop, most military families pack for one move. Families who are enrolled in the Exceptional Family Member Program (EFMP) pack at least three. There’s the household, the boxes, the truck, and the mileage log.

Then there’s the medical move with records transfers, specialty referrals, prior authorizations, durable medical equipment logistics, and the prayer that a pediatric neurologist exists within an hour’s drive of the new duty station. Don’t forget the education move: IEPs, 504 plans, early intervention services, and a school district that may or may not have heard of your kid’s diagnosis. Three moves on one timeline. Zero extra days on your orders.

And as the 2026 PCS season kicks off, the Pentagon is standing up a brand-new agency to fix the first of those moves, with no clear word yet on what changes will come for the other two.

A New Agency

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced earlier this year that the Permanent Change of Station Joint Task Force, the Pentagon’s emergency attempt to tourniquet the disaster years of military moves, was becoming a proper organization.

The Personal Property Activity, headquartered at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, now has authority over all Defense Personal Property Program operations. Major General Lance Curtis is in command under the organizing document that defines exactly how this thing will run.

Moving season doesn’t wait for document organization, however.

DoD’s latest annual report to Congress puts enrollment at roughly 105,700 service members and 136,800 family members, about 8% to 9% of the force; not niche by any stretch of the imagination. That’s a small city’s worth of people moving household goods, medical equipment, and specialized educational plans every summer.

How’s that going? A 2024 DoD-wide survey found that 33% of active-duty sponsors were dissatisfied, while another 25% were just meh with the EFMP overall. Assignment coordination during moves, which is to say, the entire reason the program exists, scored 33% satisfied, 33% dissatisfied.

When a third of your users are actively unhappy with the single most important function of your program, you do not have a messaging problem. You have a program problem.

The Great Barrier Ream

Time is ticking on the orders clock, and it only runs one way. The EFMP re-verification clock runs another. The housing waitlist at the gaining installation runs at its own speed. Your DME vendor has their own timeline for swapping out a wheelchair or a feeding pump. An IEP team at the new school district meets when the new school district’s calendar says they meet.

A PCS move for an EFMP family is five or six clocks that almost never line up. And when they don’t, families eat the difference. Jennifer Bittner knows the drill. When her husband was selected for battalion command at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, she told We Are The Mighty last September, she knew care for their three medically complex children was going to be a fight.

“Big Army did a general clearance,” she was told. The local EFMP office, when she actually called them, said the local area couldn’t offer the services her family needed.

So she did what a lot of experienced milspouses do: she researched every other battalion command location on the list herself, in case she had to make the case for one of them. That is a second full-time job. Families without Bittner’s stamina, or her institutional know-how, often just eat the bad assignment.

Austin Carrigg, who founded the nonprofit Exceptional Families of the Military after her own family ran into these gaps, told We Are The Mighty something that should bother every Pentagon planner reading this: families are getting told no for locations where, she said, “they can find care.”

One Program, Four Landlords

Jeremy Hilton has been advocating for EFMP families longer than some enlistees have been alive. A Navy veteran, Air Force spouse, and one of the parents who testified to Congress in the runup to the sweeping EFMP reforms in the FY21 NDAA, Hilton told Military.com in March that the core problem is structural.

DoW Office of Special Needs sets the policy. Every military service will run its own EFMP. The Defense Health Agency handles clinical access. Assignment commands make the final call on moves. Not one single senior leader owns the program end-to-end.

“Its intent has changed because we have advocated along the way,” Hilton told Military.com, and he’s right; the program has grown from a medical-support tool into a congressionally mandated safety net covering everything from ABA therapy to overseas school screenings. But a safety net with four landlords and no super is a safety net that sags in interesting and unpredictable places.

The PPA can absolutely fix how the boxes get from the old driveway to the new driveway. What it cannot fix, by itself, is a fragmented ownership structure in the thing the boxes are there to support.

The Sun is Starting to Shine

DoD Instruction 1315.19, issued in June 2023, standardized EFMP processes across the services for the first time, provided clearer enrollment and disenrollment procedures, a formalized “warm handoff” between EFMP offices during a PCS, and a standardized respite care program. The E-EFMP digital platform is live and being used to replace the patchwork of paper packets that defined the program for 20 years.

At Fort Hood’s Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center, the published service standard is that once an enrollment or Family Member Travel Screening package lands in E-EFMP, the family gets contacted within 72 business hours. If that call doesn’t come, Darnall publishes the EFMP office email and two phone numbers and tells families to escalate.

Whether every installation hits that standard is a whole other question. But, for now, the standard exists, in writing, on an official .mil page. Six years ago, this was not the case.

Experience is Enough

If you are about to PCS with an EFMP family, those who have been through this process will, most likely, tell you roughly the same things.

Start the paperwork before the orders drop, not after. If you think orders are coming in June, your EFMP update packet is done in March. Keep extra copies of every form, every IEP, every specialist note. The Army’s warm-handoff policy is only a policy, not a guarantee; your own file is the only one you fully control.

Build a contact list of humans, not portals. EFMP Family Support at your current installation. A phone number for the EFMP office at the gaining installation.

Your Military OneSource special needs consultant, which is a real, actual human you can reach at 800-342-9647. The PPA’s PCS Call Center is 833-MIL-MOVE.

And find the groups that already know the terrain: Exceptional Families of the Military, Partners in PROMISE, the National Military Family Association’s EFMP resources. Every one of them has been through what you’re about to go through, and every one of them will tell you more in a 20-minute phone call than a year of portal logins.

The PPA’s organizing document is due on May 1, while the 2026 PCS season is already underway. The 2023 EFMP reforms are real and are slowly changing how the program works on paper.

What nobody has promised yet is the thing every EFMP family actually needs: one phone number to call, one case manager who knows all three moves, maybe a single human being in the Pentagon whose job it is to wake up every morning worrying about the 136,800 people this program is supposed to serve.

Until then, the clocks keep running at their own speeds. The boxes get packed, the paperwork gets re-filed. And the families who’ve been doing this for years lace up, show up, and drive on, because at this point, that’s the part they know how to do in their sleep.

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