Advocates call for Pentagon to address poor living conditions at bases

Advocacy groups for military personnel and families are pressing the Pentagon to handle moldy, infested or otherwise dirty and dangerous barracks on U.S. bases across the globe.

Hots&Cots, the group leading the effort, said the “substandard” living conditions that many service members face are “unacceptable.” 

“From barracks with mold issues to outdated HVAC systems and water quality concerns, these aren’t just inconveniences — they’re serious issues that undermine the health of our service members,” Rob Evans, a former sergeant in the Army Reserve and National Guard and founder of Hots&Cots, told The Hill in a statement. 

Evans hopes the release of photographs collected by Hots&Cots — first reported by NBC News and showing mold covering the ceiling of an Army dining room in Korea and a faucet dispensing brown water at a New Jersey base, among others — will push the military to act quickly to fix the issues. 

“There are leaders who are truly committed to improving the quality of life for their service members. … However, I also recognize that some leaders are constrained by barriers beyond their control,” he said. “Hots&Cots aims to bring awareness to these issues while also highlighting the positive aspects of military life.”

Evans created Hots&Cots — an app similar to Yelp that was launched in October — to help hold leaders accountable for troops’ living conditions after he saw reports about dirty and moldy barracks across the military.

“I want soldiers to be heard because being a lower enlisted, sometimes you don’t feel like you’re heard,” he told Task & Purpose at the time. 

Evans also noted that he and a volunteer team of current and former service members evaluate the photos to verify them “to the best of our ability without actually being present in the situation.”

He said as of now, no one from the Defense Department or any of the military branches have reached out to his organization.

Asked about the effort, a Pentagon spokesperson told The Hill that DOD provides approximately 250,000 homes for service members and their families and that on Aug. 12 it launched its Housing Feedback System to “enhance transparency and accountability in DoD privatized military housing.”  

The system allows active-duty service members and their dependents to submit feedback about their current housing, ensuring that “their concerns are addressed in a timely manner,” they said.

The U.S. military has been called out for poor living conditions in the recent past, including in a damning investigative series released by Reuters in 2019.

That series prompted Congress to enact a sweeping overhaul of America’s military housing program, the largest in more than two decades, in the annual National Defense Authorization Act.

But progress has appeared to be slow, with the Government Accountability Office releasing a report in September 2023 pointing out the consistently bad living conditions in both government-owned barracks and private company-owned military housing due to lack of oversight.

This story was updated at 4:14 p.m.