Some service members have gone a year without hot water. Others sleep in their cars to get away from barracks with no air conditioning. In some cases, troops have asked for basic supplies like drywall, spackle and paint so they can make repairs themselves.
Those are among the conditions Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer says he has seen while visiting military installations. He is working with the Pentagon’s Barracks Task Force to address housing problems that have built up over decades.
“Only a couple” of the barracks Meyer has visited were in good shape, he said in an interview. Since taking on the role of senior adviser to the task force, he has visited more than eight Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps installations. He plans to visit 30 by the end of the year.
Meyer said the assignment quickly became personal. At one base, he asked a 19-year-old service member what she would change about her living situation if she could make one wish. Her answer was a hot shower, he recalled.
The problems have been documented for years. A 2023 Government Accountability Office investigation found serious health and safety hazards in military barracks. It also found that the Pentagon lacked dependable information about the state of its housing, could not say how much facilities funding went to barracks and did not provide adequate oversight.
Congress and the military services have since pledged billions of dollars for improvements. Efforts include the Marine Corps’ Barracks 2030 program and a Navy plan to renovate unaccompanied housing. Still, as of this year, 12 of the GAO’s 31 recommendations had not been addressed.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has put the work under a department-wide task force and pushed for faster action. Meyer said Hegseth expects the team to do more than assess conditions: it has been tasked with fixing them.
Meyer said he asked Hegseth to give the task force real authority, so it could make decisions, direct funding and move resources to service members more quickly—not simply add another layer of oversight.
Money is part of the challenge, Meyer said, along with years of deferred maintenance and the delays created by contracting rules and bureaucracy. A separate watchdog review put the maintenance backlog across the Pentagon’s broader facilities portfolio at $285 billion.
He also pointed to the lack of a full-year defense budget for fiscal 2027. The department is operating under a continuing resolution through Dec. 11, generally keeping programs funded at the previous year’s levels while lawmakers negotiate a spending deal.
But Meyer said the Pentagon has sometimes focused too much on whether money has been obligated or contracts signed, rather than on whether troops’ living conditions have improved. Service members, he noted, do not live in budget lines. They live in the rooms those budgets are meant to repair.
That is why Meyer says the task force needs to visit installations and talk directly with the people living in the barracks. The requests he has heard are basic: hot water, working laundry facilities, doors that lock, rooms without mold and even light bulbs. Many troops, he added, are willing to help solve the problems themselves.
Meyer said he does not blame installation commanders alone. He has met commanders who want to improve conditions, but says they need the authority and resources to do it. He was more critical of past Pentagon leadership, arguing that barracks had not received sufficient priority despite earlier improvement plans and billions in construction, renovation and maintenance spending.
He said Hegseth has made the issue a personal priority. Meyer has also taken responsibility for the effort’s outcome, saying that if the barracks are not fixed, he will be the one to blame.
For Meyer, success comes down to a straightforward test: service members should be living in places he would consider suitable for his daughters.
