The Army, Air Force and Marine Corps will be forced to reopen their tuition assistance programs — and the Coast Guard likely will be pressured to follow — under a Senate amendment to a stopgap budget bill.

The bill HR 933, renamed the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, will fund the government through Sept. 30.

It also will bring some immediate budget relief to the Department of Defense and will protect critical programs at several other federal departments.

Automatic budget cuts under the 2011 Budget Control Act sequester mechanism remain in effect. For defense, it means funding cuts of

$43 billion through September, which still will force the furlough for up to 22 days of almost 800,000 defense civilian employees and will squeeze many military family programs including commissary operations.

But passage of HR 933 will ease fiscal headaches for the military in two ways. One, it contains a new appropriations bill for defense and military construction. Two, it eases sequestration’s bite on training and readiness by shifting

$10 billion from other defense accounts into operations and maintenance where cuts are felt more acutely.

Hours before the Senate vote, Sens. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., and Jim Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, won support for an amendment directing the services to use some of that $10 billion to restore tuition assistance. It bars the services from reducing tuition budgets for this year by more than the 7.8 percent drop in operations and maintenance caused by sequestration.

It’s not yet clear if the services will bother to trim tuition programs so finely this year. But Congress wants these programs restarted soon.

The Navy alone did not suspend tuition assistance this month. The Coast Guard did, but the Hagan-Inhofe amendment probably doesn’t apply directly to the Coast Guard, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.

“This is something I have talked to our troops about,” Inhofe said. “Many of them were so alarmed to even suggest (the services) would take away the very thing that caused them to enlist in the first place.”

“We had over 300,000 service members (who) utilized this tuition benefit assistance last year,” Hagan told Senate colleagues. “And over 50,000 of them received diplomas, certificates and licenses.”

An Army National Guardsman from North Carolina, who asked not to be identified, said tuition assistance was a key enticement to enter service, which quickly led to a year of convoy patrols in Iraq.

“This definitely was a shocker,” he said of the Army’s decision in early March to suspend the program. “It is one of the last things I thought they would touch, the education of American veterans.”

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