Some American service members are defending the nation abroad while coming home to barracks so dilapidated that some go a year without hot water, sleep in their cars to escape stifling, unairconditioned rooms, or beg for basic supplies like drywall, spackle and paint so they can patch the damage themselves.
According to Fox News, those conditions are among the realities Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer says he has encountered while touring military installations at the direction of War Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has tasked him with confronting a barracks system crippled by decades of neglect. "I would tell you that there's only a couple that I've seen that are good," Meyer told Fox News Digital in an interview Thursday, a blunt assessment that underscores how far the Pentagon has drifted from the traditional conservative expectation that a nation which sends young Americans into harms way must, at minimum, house them with dignity.
Meyer now serves as senior adviser to the Pentagon's Barracks Task Force, a role that has taken him to more than eight installations across the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps since he accepted the assignment. He plans to visit 30 bases before the end of the year, a pace that reflects both the urgency of the problem and a deliberate effort to bypass the complacent bureaucracy that has allowed these conditions to fester.
"What I thought was gonna be a professional job very quickly turned into personal," Meyer said, describing how the mission has shifted from a technical review to a moral obligation. For a combat veteran who has already borne the weight of war, the sight of young troops living in substandard conditions has become a deeply personal affront to the promises this country makes to its volunteers.
At one installation, Meyer recalled asking a 19-year-old service member what she would change about her living conditions if she could "wave a magic wand." "If she could just have a hot shower," Meyer recalled.
"It's absolutely heartbreaking." The Pentagon's barracks problems long predate Hegseth and have survived repeated, often highly publicized, attempts at reform that produced glossy plans but little relief for the rank and file.
A sweeping 2023 Government Accountability Office investigation documented serious health and safety hazards and found that the department lacked reliable information about the condition of its own barracks, could not determine how much of its facilities spending went toward them and provided insufficient oversight. Congress and the military services have since committed billions toward improvements, including initiatives ranging from the Marine Corps' "Barracks 2030" to a Navy overhaul of unaccompanied housing.
Yet serious problems persist, and as of this year, 12 of GAO's 31 recommendations remained outstanding, a telling indicator of how slowly the federal bureaucracy moves even when the stakes involve the health and morale of those in uniform. Hegseth has sought to centralize the effort under a department-wide task force and accelerate improvements, with Meyer saying the secretary has made clear that identifying problems is no longer enough.
"The secretary has made it clear to me he doesn't expect me to observe this, study it, or to make it better. He expects me to fix it," Meyer said. "And that's exactly what we're going to do."
Meyer, the only Medal of Honor hero to reenlist after receiving the award, said one of his first requests was for Hegseth to give the task force an "authoritative role," rather than simply create another layer of oversight. The goal, he said, was to give the team the ability "to go out and make decisions, to be able to have impact, to be able to make change, and to be able to direct where that funding goes and how fast it gets to our service members."
From Meyers perspective, the problem is not simply a matter of insufficient money, though funding shortfalls, continuing resolutions and years of deferred maintenance have all played a part. He argues that layers of contracting rules and bureaucracy have become a self-protective shield for officials who find it easier to say no than to cut through red tape and authorize even relatively basic repairs.
A separate watchdog review found the Pentagon facing a $285 billion maintenance backlog across its broader military facilities portfolio, underscoring the scale of the department's infrastructure challenges. That staggering figure reflects not just aging buildings, but a culture of federal mismanagement in which sprawling agencies expand their missions while neglecting core responsibilities like safe housing for troops.
"When you look at the contracting aspect, it's easier for people to say no," Meyer said, capturing the risk-averse mindset that often dominates federal procurement. Funding is also part of the problem, according to Meyer, who pointed to Congress' failure to enact full-year defense appropriations for fiscal 2027, a familiar Washington failure that leaves real people in limbo.
The Pentagon is currently operating under a continuing resolution through Dec. 11, which generally funds ongoing programs at prior-year rates while lawmakers negotiate a broader spending package. "When you can't get a budget, when you're waiting on Congress to pass a budget, to be able to get the funding there, I mean, that is a huge issue," Meyer said, highlighting how political brinkmanship in Washington translates into cold showers and moldy walls for 19-year-olds in uniform.
But he also argued that the Pentagon has too often measured progress by how much money has been obligated or put under contract, rather than whether troops actually see improvements in their living conditions. "Our service members don't, they don't live in our budget lines," Meyer said.
"They live in the rooms that those budget lines are there to impact." For Meyer, that has meant getting out of Washington and hearing directly from the troops living with the consequences of years of neglect and misaligned priorities.
"You can't fix these problems or understand these problems by standing on the carpet of the Pentagon," he said. "You've got to go out there and talk to these service members."
What he has heard, Meyer said, is striking partly because of how little troops are asking for, a sobering reminder that the bar has been set unconscionably low. "They're asking for a hot shower. They're asking for a place to wash their clothes. They're asking for a door that locks. They're asking to be able to go to sleep in a place that doesn't have mold. I mean, they're asking for light bulbs."
"They're willing to be part of the solution," he added, suggesting that if the system would simply empower local leaders and residents, many problems could be addressed faster and cheaper than through the usual contracting labyrinth. That willingness stands in stark contrast to a federal culture that often treats service members as line items rather than as young men and women who deserve the same basic standards any parent would demand for their own children.
Meyer stopped short of placing the blame solely on installation commanders, saying many want to improve conditions but have been constrained by a system that has normalized poor barracks for years. "I think this is a multidimensional problem, and it's complex," he said.
"I think that you have commanders out there that want to take care of their service members. I've seen that across the board. But ... they still have to have the ability to do that." Meyer was far less forgiving of previous Pentagon leadership, arguing that years of investments and reform initiatives had failed to translate into adequate living conditions for troops.
"Don't kid yourself," Meyer said. "In the past ... it wasn't a priority to the leadership."
Previous administrations and military leaders did launch barracks improvement efforts and devoted billions of dollars to construction, renovation and maintenance, even as government watchdogs continued to document serious deficiencies. The pattern is familiar in Washington: announce a program, spend heavily, declare progress, and then move on, while the people supposedly served by the initiative see little change in their daily lives.
Meyer said Hegseth has made the issue a personal priority, signaling a break from that pattern and a return to a more traditional, people-first approach to defense policy. "We have the Secretary of War who is putting people first, and he's not just saying that, he's doing it through his actions," Meyer said.
Meyer has put his own name on whether the latest effort succeeds, saying previously that if the barracks aren't fixed, there is "only one person to blame" himself. That level of personal accountability is rare in the modern federal bureaucracy and aligns more closely with the conservative belief that responsibility should be clearly assigned, not diffused across endless committees and task forces.
Asked what "fixed" would actually look like, Meyer offered a simpler standard than any Pentagon metric, one rooted in family and common sense rather than spreadsheets and performance indicators. "People are living in places that I would be okay for my daughters living in," he said, a test that many Americans would likely find more compelling than any official readiness report or budget chart.
The broader question now is whether Washington will allow that standard to guide real change, or whether the effort will be swallowed by the same culture that produced a $285 billion maintenance backlog while young troops begged for hot water and working locks. For conservatives who have long argued that a government big enough to regulate every corner of civilian life still cannot manage its basic duties, the state of the barracks is not just a scandal but a case study in why accountability, limited bureaucracy and local empowerment are not ideological luxuries, but necessities for those who serve.
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