It's been more than ten months since Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced a plan to clean up the places where most younger troops live.
In an October 2025 video, he held up a copy of a 2023 Government Accountability Office report, which identified issues with sewage, mold, roaches and bedbugs at barracks around the country.
"How can we expect them to be ready for anything on the battlefield when their own living space is a constant source of stress and frustration?" Hegseth said in the video. "That all ends now. This barracks task force will deliver results, not excuses."
But one of the members of the task force said he still hasn't seen the plan. Rob Evans is an Army veteran and former sergeant in the Army Reserves and the North Carolina National Guard. Evans runs "Hots and Cots," a website that publishes reviews of military housing and dining facilities by rank and file troops.
"I was part of the barracks task force," Evans said. "I have not heard from them. I have not heard a lot from the barracks task force of what's happening and where funding is going."
The Pentagon received $1.2 billion from Congress last year to start repairs to the barracks. Each service branch also surveyed its own barracks. None of that data has been made public.
Hegseth's office released a statement saying, "That funding is actively being deployed on real projects to improve living conditions for our service members."
Evans said he's seen press releases from various installations around the military, but the projects aren't driving the change he expected.
"I am seeing results, but I don't think it's at the scale of the task force announcement that came out," he said. "I still see service members reporting large issues with mold, A/C outages.”
4000 service members were without air conditioning at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, he said.
"Unless you're actually showing things getting fixed and repaired, service members aren't going to really buy in," Evans said. "Anybody who served in the military has seen this before. So you need to actually kind of show the work being done and what was done."
A new report from the Government Accountability Office found that the Pentagon has a backlog of $285 billion dollars in building maintenance needs. It found that while some of the problems identified in its 2023 report have been addressed, many others remain unrepaired.
The August 2026 report concluded that the military routinely requests less money that it needs for facility maintenance due to competing priorities. The GAO also found that the military branches have trouble attracting maintenance personnel and have inconsistent systems to prioritize and track repairs.
In addition to dealing with aging barracks, the Navy is also squeezed for space. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle announced an ambitious goal to end the service's long-standing practice of requiring junior sailors to live on board ships, even after coming home after months at sea.
"So far, we've moved more than 6,000 sailors off ships and into housing ashore, and more will follow in the coming months. With many of our barracks now near full capacity, we're also working to expand housing allowances for more senior sailors," Caudle said in a social media video produced by the Navy.
The Navy announced two years ago that it was working on a plan to privatize all the barracks in Hampton Roads, Virginia - home to the largest concentration of Navy bases in the county. But plans have been delayed without explanation from the Navy.
Evans said he is worried that the Pentagon is leaning toward large scale privatization. Several private housing companies faced lawsuits from tenants when they took over family military housing on or near bases around the country.
"I strongly believe our greatest recruiting tool are those in uniform, and if their quality of life is poor, they're not going to be going to tell their friends to go and sign up. They're going to probably try to talk them out of it," Evans said.
The Trump Administration included billions of dollars more for barracks projects in its proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget, but Congress left for the summer without passing what would be the largest defense bill in history.
This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.
