The cost of maintenance work needed on barracks and other facilities has doubled over five years to $285 billion, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, as the Pentagon has struggled to hire and retain workers while underfunding on-base repairs.
The Aug. 21 report faulted the Pentagon for not requesting enough money from Congress to fully fund facility repairs, improvements, and construction. The GAO said that the military services were funding about 80% of their maintenance needs, falling short of the Defense Department’s goal of 90%.
The Defense Department has more than 736,000 facilities around the world. The total deferred maintenance on many of the buildings stood at $137 billion in fiscal year 2020, the report says.
“Since that time, DOD reported that its deferred maintenance requirements increased to an estimated $285 billion in fiscal year 2025—a significant and growing risk to the department’s ability to support its mission,” the report says.
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The report, which was first reported by Military Times, also found that about one-third of buildings on U.S. bases are more than 50 years old. During a visit to Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, California, the GAO officials saw buildings that were more than 80 years old. Part of one building, which installation officials want to demolish, had tested positive for mold and asbestos.
“Although that part of the building had been condemned, officials said the other part of the building tested negative for mold and asbestos and remained in use for these services,” the report says. “Occupants reported discomfort with the building’s condition and had personally supplied additional air filters to safeguard their workspace.”
Another of the report’s findings is that the Defense Department is having a hard time hiring and keeping maintenance workers, including in “remote and isolated installations,” such as Andersen Air Force Base on Guam.
Officials from five such bases told the GAO they used different approaches to tackle the challenges of recruiting and retaining workers from small local populations along with “limited incentives” to attract workers from elsewhere, the report says.
At both Andersen Air Force Base and Naval Base Guam, installation officials reported using the H-2B visa program to hire foreign nationals from the Philippines and other countries to supplement their civilian facility maintenance and construction workers, according to the report
To fix the issues raised in the report, the GAO made a series of recommendations, including that the Defense Department should conduct an assessment of the risks to its missions and the troops’ quality of life posed by backlogs in military construction and facility repair projects.
Although it agreed fully or in part with most of the GAO’s recommendations, the Defense Department disagreed that it should face more oversight. Defense officials rejected a recommendation that they provide annual reports on how the department is meeting revised maintenance standards.
Mark S. Snider, deputy assistant secretary of defense for infrastructure modernization and resilience, wrote in response to the report that the Pentagon has “no capacity to take on the increased level of program oversight that is being recommended for its vast portfolio of over 736,000 real property assets.”
The GAO countered that the Defense Department is required to “set appropriate workforce levels to accomplish its responsibilities or to take appropriate steps within existing workforce levels.”
U.S. troops have long faced substandard living conditions and other issues with on-base facilities. The Pentagon has asked Congress for $57 billion as part of next fiscal year’s budget to address these issues.
Many of the issues raised in the most recent report have not been addressed since the GAO issued an earlier report in 2023 that found numerous problems with barracks, said Rob Evans, an Army veteran who runs the Hots & Cots app on which military members report and share problems with on-base facilities.
“Three years later, the department-wide version of that same gap is the headline finding: DOD still isn’t requesting full funding for maintenance it already knows it needs,” Evans told Task & Purpose. “Congress has said for years that failing to fix this hurts recruitment and retention, and now GAO is saying the same thing.”
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