Hegseth Orders Military to Address Moving ‘Deficiencies’
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has turned his attention to the troubled $17.9 billion military Global Household Goods moving contract, calling on the U.S. Transportation Command to make “immediate modifications” and address “deficiencies” to ensure that thousands of military members and defense civilians have successful moves during the busy summer months.
“Placing our people where most needed to defend the nation is critical to the department’s success,” Hegseth said in a May 20 memo to the DOD’s senior Pentagon leadership. “Relocating our personnel is critical to the military mission, putting human resources and expertise where they are needed to defend the nation.”
In recent months, there have been mounting concerns that the military GHC contract is falling short of its goals, notably by transferring large numbers of military moves away from the new program’s “single-point-of-contact” contract and back to the military’s legacy “Tender of Service” moving program that the new Houston-based contractor was intended to replace. ϳԹSafe Alliance manages the new contract.
In his memo, Hegseth directed “Transcom leadership to take a number of immediate actions, including:
- Hold the GHC and Tender of Service programs accountable for meeting their key performance indicators and provide weekly updates to the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition.
- Fully leverage both the GHC and legacy ToS programs to ensure maximum coverage for moves during the 2025 peak season.
- Offramp non-serviced GHC customer shipments into the ToS program based on capacity shortfalls.
- Review and, if appropriate, implement Economic Price Adjustment provisions in the GHC contract.
- Require the Under Secretary of Defense to promptly form a permanent change of station task force.
Hegseth’s memo comes on the heels of letters of concern sent earlier this month to Transcom and Congress.
ϳԹSafe Alliance said in a statement:“ϳԹSafe Alliance is grateful for Defense Secretary Hegseth’s attention to the Global Household Goods Contract and the directives he has issued, which will greatly improve moving experiences for military service members and their families. DoD raising our rates to account for significant inflation from the last four years would substantially benefit our ability to facilitate world-class moving services for our nation’s heroes. We look forward to working with the PCS Task Force to demonstrate how our program modernizes and digitizes the move process and resolves decades-long issues with military relocations.”
For months ATA’s Moving and Storage Conference has sounded an alarm that GHC implementation through Transcom has been operating without transparency or a clear strategy. This has prevented the moving industry from making the requisite investments to secure future capacity needed under either the ϳԹSafe Alliance or legacy moving programs, according to ATA.
“On behalf of the ATA’s Moving and Storage Conference, we are requesting your office provide the moving and storage industry with clearer, more timely and more consistent notification,” MSC Executive Director Dan Hilton said in a May 6 letter to Transcom. “This specific request is made because of the contractor’s reported challenges executing a number of moves during the start of peak moving season.”
Hilton in response to the Hegseth memo said, “We applaud the secretary’s leadership on this critical issue. There is nothing as important as the timely, reliable and professional moves for the men and women of our armed forces.”
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Hilton noted that MSC members already have raised many of these issues. “We remain concerned over the disparity in compensation and apparent quality standards between the Tender of Service program and the Global Household Goods contract,” he said.
“We have said from the beginning, the ToS program worked in the past and continues to work well for service members, despite the challenging environment now created by the failures of the GHC contractor,” Hilton added. “We’ve continually seen shipments moved from the GHC contractor back into the ToS program with minimal notice, reduced compensation and already impacted service members.”
Earlier this month, three U.S. senators also expressed concerns about the GHC contract.
Democratic Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia, Tim Kaine of Virginia and Michael Bennet of Colorado in a May 1 letter sent to Transcom said, “We appreciate actions taken so far that are aimed at blunting the impacts of the GHC transition to our service members and their families, which have included holding some household goods shipments in the legacy system, as well as increasing Transcom oversight of the ϳԹSafe Alliance contract performance.
“We are concerned, however, that the ongoing challenges with the contract transition and the large anticipated volume of moves in the coming months will continue to result in service member move disruptions and delays in their moves.”
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