New DoD Board Mandates Career Restoration, Back Pay for Service Members Denied COVID Vaccine Religious Exemptions

The “Reaffirming Every Servicemembers’ Trust Of Religious Exemptions Act,” or the RESTORE Act, establishes a new Special Review Board within the Department of Defense (DoD) to audit and fix career damage for military personnel who sought religious accommodations from the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The Board must investigate every service member who requested an accommodation and is still serving, ensuring that asking for the exemption or refusing the vaccine didn't negatively impact their promotions, assignments, or ability to stay in the service. This is a massive, mandated cleanup effort with a tight deadline, requiring the Board to review all affected personnel within one year of the Act becoming law.

The Career Reset Button

If the Board finds that a service member’s career was hurt by the religious accommodation process, the bill mandates specific, concrete fixes. This isn't just about apologies; it's about restoring real-world benefits. For instance, if a promotion was missed, the service member must be promoted to the rank they would have achieved, and their Date of Rank (DOR) must be corrected to match their peers (SEC. 2). They are also entitled to restored pay and benefits, including back pay and retirement contributions. For those who left the service because their accommodation request was wrongly denied—a situation the bill defines as “coerced voluntary separation”—the Board has the authority to order their reinstatement.

Wiping the Slate Clean

One of the most immediate and impactful provisions requires the DoD to completely scrub negative administrative actions related to vaccine refusal from service members’ records (SEC. 2). This means removing reprimands, bad evaluations, or denied promotions that stemmed from the mandate issue. For Reserve and National Guard members, the Board must issue satisfactory participation credit if they missed training due to this issue, adjusting their career assignments so they can be competitive again. This is key because a single negative mark can derail an entire military career, making this provision a genuine career lifeline for those affected.

Accountability and the Clock

The DoD is now on the hook for major reporting and quick action. The Secretary of Defense must send an initial report to Congress within 90 days detailing their plan to comply and then provide quarterly updates on how many cases the Board has reviewed, how many promotions and back pay awards were granted, and how many records were cleaned up (SEC. 3). Critically, once an individual case is reviewed, the military must deliver the compensation—the back pay, the promotion—within 60 days. To ensure the military follows through, the DoD Inspector General must conduct an independent audit within 18 months to verify that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) was applied consistently across all branches (SEC. 3).

The Cost of Redress

While the bill authorizes necessary funds to make this happen, the scope of the mandate is significant. The DoD faces a substantial administrative burden and financial cost to conduct a full audit of accommodation requests across all branches, determine subjective “career damage,” and then deliver retroactive pay and promotions. For the average service member, this review offers a path to fairness, but the massive, mandated cleanup could strain DoD resources and potentially slow down other administrative processes. The criteria for determining when a service member was “negatively affected” is broad, which could lead to complex disputes over exactly how much rank or pay needs to be restored, but the intent is clearly to err on the side of making the service member whole.