Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer has detailed alarming living conditions faced by U.S. troops across various military installations. Meyer, serving as a senior adviser to the Pentagon's Barracks Task Force under Secretary Pete Hegseth, has visited over eight installations and plans to inspect 30 by year's end. He reports that many troops experience issues such as a year without hot water, sleeping in cars to escape barracks without air conditioning, and the need for basic repairs like drywall and paint.
"I would tell you that there's only a couple that I've seen that are good," Meyer stated in an interview with Fox News Digital. He described the mission as having quickly turned personal, driven by the desire to address decades of neglect in the barracks system.
Meyer recounted an interaction with a 19-year-old service member who wished for little more than a hot shower. "It's absolutely heartbreaking," he said. He has also observed extensive mold and water damage, and in one instance, a ceiling that appeared to be caving in.
The issues within military barracks are not new, predating the current administration and having survived previous reform attempts. A 2023 Government Accountability Office investigation highlighted serious health and safety hazards, noting the department's lack of reliable data on facility conditions and insufficient oversight. Despite billions allocated towards improvements by Congress and military services, significant problems persist, with 12 of the GAO's 31 recommendations still outstanding this year.
Secretary Hegseth has aimed to centralize improvement efforts through a department-wide task force. Meyer emphasized that Hegseth expects the task force not just to identify problems but to "fix it."
Meyer believes the problem is multifaceted, involving funding shortfalls, continuing resolutions, deferred maintenance, and bureaucratic hurdles that slow down even basic repairs. He pointed to the Pentagon's current operating under a continuing resolution due to Congress's delay in enacting full-year defense appropriations as a significant impediment.
He also criticized the Pentagon's tendency to measure progress by how much money is obligated or contracted, rather than by tangible improvements in troop living conditions. "Our service members don't live in our budget lines," Meyer stated. "They live in the rooms that those budget lines are there to impact."
To truly understand and address these issues, Meyer stressed the importance of being on the ground, interacting directly with service members, and hearing their concerns firsthand. The requests from troops are often basic: a place to wash clothes, a functional door lock, mold-free living spaces, and even light bulbs.
Meyer expressed that while many installation commanders want to improve conditions, they are constrained by a system that has normalized substandard housing. He was less forgiving of previous Pentagon leadership, suggesting that barracks improvement had not been a priority in the past.
He indicated that the ultimate goal of the Barracks Task Force is to ensure that troops are living in conditions that he would find acceptable for his own daughters. "People are living in places that I would be okay for my daughters living in," he said.