Golden Fleece Award

In a letter to DOD Secretary Lloyd Austin, Rep. Hill writes:

 

Dear Secretary Austin:

 

I write today to inform you that the United States Department of Defense (DOD) is the most recent recipient of my Golden Fleece Award. I am awarding this to DOD for maintaining poor oversight over the housing programs and facilities under the Department’s management, which has allowed health and safety issues impacting our service members to prolong.

 

A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that DOD has inconsistently assessed the conditions of barracks, insufficiently measured the impact of the barracks on service member quality of life and readiness, unreliably tracked funding for barracks housing programs, and allowed these issues to compound. These findings amount to a serious and negligent absence of oversight that leaves our service members worse off and fails to justify your $35.9 billion request for facilities investments in Military Construction and Family Housing programs and Facilities Sustainment, Restoration and Modernization.

 

The American military manages close to 9,000 barracks facilities worldwide, almost all of which are government-owned, operated, and maintained.  Yet, there does not exist reliable information about the conditions of barracks despite first-hand reports showing that some barracks pose serious health and safety risks. On-site assessments conducted as part of GAO’s reporting found that condition scores could be very inaccurate. In one example, investigators found that a “barracks facility that had been closed for renovation due to long-standing plumbing and electrical issues” and deemed “uninhabitable” had a condition score above the threshold for “fair or good condition”. GAO also found that condition assessments were conducted inconsistently and that “condition scores are not timely enough to be useful in prioritization decisions.”

 

Additionally, the report from GAO stated that “[the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD)] does not routinely monitor the effects of barracks conditions on service members’ quality of life or readiness, despite DOD requirements to monitor morale and welfare aspects of the housing program.” Within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, officials shared that two of the reasons why they do not monitor the effects of barracks conditions are because barracks conditions are “a less important factor affecting service members’ quality of life when compared to other factors” and some “consider housing to be separate from quality of life”. However, both officials and service members shared that barracks conditions directly affect service members’ quality of life and readiness with poor living conditions negatively impacting work performance, training, and the ability to recruit qualified personnel.

 

The GAO report also brought to light the extent to which reliable and consistent data about funding information and requests for military housing are unavailable. When deciding how much funding to request for barracks improvement projects, the service branches primarily rely on two pieces of information: the facility’s condition score, which reflects a barracks’ physical condition based on building systems; and the facility’s mission score, which indicates the risk to mission should the barracks facility fail. As already mentioned, facility condition scores are unreliable and untimely; regarding mission critical scores, both service members and military leaders again reported that “the inconsistency of rank threshold policies between services and across installations is unfair and hurts morale.” 

 

These problems are not new; rather, they are compounding at cost to the American taxpayers. GAO reported in January 2022, that “[f]or fiscal year 2020, DOD reported deferred maintenance backlogs totaling $137 billion.” With “the department’s focus on sustaining mission-critical facilities”, installation officials reported that “lower priority facilities [become] chronically neglected… and need restoration or replacement actions that invariably cost more than the sustainment activities that were deferred.”  In GAO’s 2022 report, officials also asserted, “the size of current deferred maintenance backlogs is unsustainable” and reducing backlogs will require “disposing of facilities in poor and failing condition rather than sustaining or repairing them.”

 

This information, when evaluated in a larger context together, exhibits that the DOD is aware that oversight of barracks facilities is currently inadequate and that it is the agency’s responsibility to update guidance, improve procedures, and ultimately ensure service members have safe and healthy living quarters that maintain troop readiness. However, GAO outlines how DOD continues to ignore their responsibilities and permits barracks facilities to deteriorate. Without recourse, your agency conveys a willful negligence to address this long-standing problem, and your request for funding without action demonstrates a lack of interest in committing to addressing your role in exacerbating this problem. Given that there are more than 9,000 barracks facilities under DOD jurisdiction, if the Department does not have the proper capacity to manage oversight and maintenance of all these locations, your agency should make that determination clear to Congress.

 

I am committed to supporting our nation’s service members and ensuring they have safe and quality housing. Should you require any additional authority from Congress to address these concerns, I urge you to notify us as soon as possible. I would also welcome any technical assistance you could provide to Congress to correct statutory issues that may have contributed to this problem. Thank you for your consideration, and I look forward to working with you to address this important issue.