Pentagon seeks $21B for barracks as repair backlog doubles

By Brett Rowland
The Center Square

The Pentagon is asking Congress for more than $21 billion for military barracks in its fiscal year 2027 budget request, the largest such investment in recent years, but the government’s top watchdog says the deferred maintenance backlog has more than doubled since 2020 and important recommendations from its last barracks review remain unfinished.

The $1.5 trillion military budget request includes $8.8 billion for repairs such as HVAC fixes, mold remediation and electrical and plumbing updates; $10.2 billion for new barracks construction; and $2.5 billion for preventive maintenance. It is part of a broader $57.2 billion request for facility sustainment, restoration and modernization across the Department of War.

“The investments in this budget will fix all substandard barracks and eliminate barracks that have been deemed poor or failing,” Lt. Gen. Steven Whitney said at a Pentagon budget briefing.

The request comes after a scathing September 2023 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office detailed sewage backups, rodent infestations, mold, inoperable fire systems and broken heating and air conditioning systems at barracks where troops are required to live. The report found those conditions undermined military readiness and quality of life. It also found the Department of Defense had not fully funded its facilities program for years, resulting in a backlog of at least $137 billion in deferred maintenance costs as of fiscal year 2020.

That backlog has since grown to an estimated $280 billion for all Defense Department facilities as of fiscal year 2025, Rashmi Agarwal, a director with GAO’s Defense Capabilities and Management team, told The Center Square. The GAO plans to issue a report this summer on infrastructure maintenance across all military bases.

Conditions were so bad in some places that service members sometimes took “drastic action, such as getting married, just to leave the barracks,” according to the GAO report.

Undersecretary of Defense Comptroller Jules “Jay” Hurst III said that condition scores were used to determine how much money was needed to fix those barracks.

“We have a list of barracks that are in poor or failing condition and we created a building condition index,” he said at the April 21 budget briefing. “And I think if you’re below 80 on that index, you’re considered poor or failing. So, we went through and calculated how much money we’d have to invest to remediate every single barracks that’s in that condition. We’re going to remediate all the barracks that are poor or substandard.”

However, in a statement to The Center Square, a senior defense official said the Barracks Task Force wall-to-wall assessments were not traditional condition assessments – they were an urgent triage operation to identify and correct acute health and safety issues – and did not produce a total count of poor or failing buildings. It was not immediately clear whether Hurst was referring to a separate, pre-existing list or the BTF assessments.

That distinction matters because one of the central problems identified in the 2023 GAO report was that condition scores for buildings were inaccurate. The report noted that military services calculate a condition score from 0 to 100, but those scores didn’t always match actual conditions. One barracks had been closed as uninhabitable due to long-standing plumbing and electrical issues while carrying a condition score above 90.

The Pentagon said it has since overhauled its approach. In April 2025, the department published Unaccompanied Housing Habitability Standards, which established pass-fail criteria for living spaces – including zero visible mold and functional HVAC systems – designed to flag uninhabitable rooms regardless of a building’s overall condition score. The department also said it is replacing collateral-duty service members with permanent civilian barracks managers at each installation to ensure more consistent oversight, and mandating in-person inspections of all permanent party barracks every two years.

“The Department does not need to choose between ‘find and fix’ and systemic changes; it is aggressively doing both,” the senior defense official told The Center Square. “We actively carried out the Secretary’s directive to immediately find and fix acute issues. The BTF has impacted thousands of warriors, with over $800 million obligated to rapidly improve living conditions across the force.”

Agarwal said important recommendations from the 2023 report remain open.

“While DOD has taken steps to address many recommendations, important recommendations remain open and we will continue to track the actions the department is taking,” she said.

A separate GAO report issued in February 2026 on the Pentagon’s 12 joint bases found the department still needs to assess the risks to missions posed by not meeting its funding goals for infrastructure maintenance.

The problems were not new. The GAO raised nearly identical concerns in a June 2002 report on recruit training barracks, documenting inadequate heating and air conditioning, mold and plumbing failures across all 10 basic training locations. That report found the same root cause: Army officials told investigators that maintenance funding shortfalls were driven by “the migration of funding from maintenance accounts to support other priorities.” The condition scoring problem was present then too – GAO inspectors found that Parris Island barracks rated near the top of the condition scale were actually among the worst they observed.

During a 2023 Congressional hearing on the more recent report, Elizabeth Field, then-director of Defense Capabilities and Management for the GAO, told lawmakers the pattern had persisted across decades. Ten years before that hearing, she said, the Pentagon had praised its progress modernizing barracks with increased funding and promised to maintain them.

“Obviously, that didn’t happen,” Field testified. “It will take years to reverse the chronic neglect and underfunding we uncovered.”

She said the problem was not a lack of Congressional funding, but how the Pentagon chose to spend it.

“The department tends to only fund about 80% of sustainment needs and the facilities that most often lose out are things like barracks,” she said.

U.S> Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., a retired Air Force brigadier general who chaired the House Armed Services Committee’s Military Quality-of-Life Panel in the 118th Congress, said the pattern of neglect has a clear cause.

“The barracks budget has been looted for many years for other priorities,” he told The Center Square.

Since the 2023 report, the Pentagon has made a series of pledges to improve conditions. The fiscal year 2025 budget included $1.1 billion for barracks construction. The fiscal year 2026 budget requested $7.2 billion for barracks, including $1.2 billion for new construction and $6 billion for facility sustainment. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced a $1.2 billion barracks task force investment in December 2025, with $400 million for immediate repairs and $800 million for critical renovations. The Pentagon said Wednesday that more than $800 million of that has been obligated so far.

“The Department is actioning a comprehensive, data-driven plan to permanently address barracks quality, with the FY27 budget providing the resources required to restore existing barracks and construct new buildings where necessary,” the defense official said. “Ultimately, this combination of rapid remediation and systematic oversight ensures our Warriors can focus entirely on their mission, not real estate management.”

The GAO said Congress has continued to place significant focus on improving barracks conditions through legislation and hearings, and that it will continue to support that oversight work. A new GAO report on infrastructure maintenance across all military bases is expected this summer.