AUTHOR: Michael Sinnock

A Navy veteran and federal employee, Michael Sinnock has a direct answer for anyone who thinks veterans' preference in hiring is just a procedural hurdle.

This week, a government services official was placed on leave after posting publicly that veterans' preference rules are hampering federal agencies from recruiting the technical talent they need. A workforce expert quoted in coverage of the story said the preference system has become a collection of procedural hurdles rather than a mechanism achieving its intended outcome, partly because the rules have not been substantially updated in decades. The debate is real, and it is happening now, inside the same federal hiring system that employed me.

I am watching it from the inside of two relevant experiences at once: as a Navy veteran who served from 1994 to 1997 aboard USS Tarawa (LHA-1) as a Boatswain's Mate Petty Officer 3rd Class, and as a federal employee who has worked at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's Memphis District Office since 2022. I am not a neutral observer and I will not pretend otherwise. But I am also not going to offer the reflexive tribal defense of veterans' preference that does not actually engage with the legitimate parts of the argument.

Here is what I know, from having been on both sides of this, that the current debate keeps missing.

What Military Service Actually Builds

Veterans' preference in federal hiring rests on a genuine premise: that military service develops qualities that translate directly into effective public service. Discipline. Accountability. The ability to operate under pressure, with incomplete information, in conditions that do not accommodate excuses. The specific kind of reliability that forms when unreliability carries real consequences.

Those premises describe something real. I know this not as an opinion but as someone who spent three years working on the deck of a naval vessel.

A Boatswain's Mate works outside, on the water, in all conditions. You maintain equipment that others depend on for their safety. You stand watch when the watch matters. You learn that the work does not stop because you are tired, or because the weather is difficult, or because the timing would be more convenient later. That is not a philosophy you arrive at intellectually. It is a practice, repeated until it becomes the default setting of how you approach every obligation you take on afterward.

The default does not leave you when you take off the uniform. It enters every job you hold, every team you join, every organization that takes you in. It is not automatically more valuable than technical skills a non-veteran candidate has developed. But it is real, and it is earned, and it is worth something that does not reduce to a preference point on an application form.

What a Federal Workplace Actually Gets

Michael Shane Sinnock entered federal service at the EEOC's Memphis District Office in 2022, years after his Navy service and after a career that moved through logistics management, national cemetery grounds caretaking, and the quieter work of demonstrating consistent reliability across a long stretch of civilian life. What he brought to the federal workplace was not a collection of government-ready skills assembled for a hiring process. It was something more foundational than that.

It was the understanding that the mission matters more than the day. That process exists for real reasons and deserves real attention. That showing up the same way regardless of whether close scrutiny is present is not optional — it is the baseline. Those things are what military service specifically trains. They are also what makes a person genuinely effective inside the culture of federal public service, where the work is often slow-moving, where the stakes are real even when they are not dramatic, and where institutional trust accumulates over years rather than weeks.

The policy debate about whether preference rules need updating is legitimate and deserves honest engagement. If an agency needs a specific technical competency and a veteran applicant does not possess it, preference points do not bridge that gap. The conversation about modernizing the rules is one worth having.

What the conversation should not do is conflate the technical question of how preference is administered with the underlying question of what veterans actually contribute. Those are not the same argument, and treating them as if they are collapses something important.

Here is what veterans consistently bring to federal service, in specific terms:

- Reliability under ambiguity: military training prepares people to keep working and making decisions when information is incomplete and conditions are uncertain — which describes most of federal service most of the time.

- Genuine process discipline: veterans understand that procedures exist for reasons and that bypassing them has consequences. That is not bureaucratic timidity. It is operational competence.

- Long time horizons: service teaches people to think past the immediate task toward the larger mission. Federal work rewards that orientation.

- Accountability without prompting: the habit of self-directed accountability runs deep in veterans. It does not require external management to activate.

- Hard-won consistency: a BM3 on a ship cannot have an off day when the equipment and the watch matter. That standard, once trained into a person, tends to hold across the rest of their working life.

The debate about modernizing veterans' preference rules is a policy conversation worth having. The suggestion that what veterans bring to federal service is primarily a procedural artifact rather than a genuine professional value is a different claim, and it is not supported by what I have seen from the inside of both the service and the work.

I write about public service and what it actually looks like from the inside every week at www.michaelsinnock.com. The full professional story is on the Project Page there.

AUTHOR BIO:

About Michael Sinnock: Michael Sinnock is a U.S. Navy veteran and Office Automation Assistant with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's Memphis District Office. A Memphis professional whose career spans military service, federal employment, and logistics management, he writes about public service, resilience, the curiosity that keeps life interesting, and the long, worthwhile work of becoming someone you are proud of. Read more of his writing at www.michaelsinnock.com.