At Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, an office building serving disabled veterans and other employees had depended on just three elevators for a years-long period of time. Only one still ran — it was cobbled together with mismatched parts because no elevator technician was posted anywhere nearby. Eventually, a maintenance customer at the base taught themselves basic elevator repair just to keep the building functional. This story from a new Government Accountability Office report captures the broader state of the Defense Department’s vast real estate portfolio — neglected, improvised, and slowly degrading.
The GAO has found that the Pentagon manages more than 736,000 facilities worldwide, valued at roughly $2.6 trillion, and allowed $285 billion in deferred maintenance to accumulate by fiscal year 2025. Five years earlier, that figure had stood at $137 billion. In 2014, the department set a goal requiring each military service to fund at least 90% of what its own facilities model prescribed for upkeep. Investigators have discovered that the services have hovered around 80% for years, with dramatic variation by base and branch. The Marine Corps, for instance, saw its funding request drop from 80% to 40% of recommended levels over a five-year span. A decline officials attributed to a deliberate shift toward larger repair projects at the expense of routine maintenance.
The consequences are visible at the installation level. Fort Benning in Georgia has fared best among the eight bases GAO examined in depth, receiving 83% of its recommended sustainment funding. Andersen Air Force Base in Guam has gotten the worst of it, at just 37%. At Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, several piers deteriorated so badly that the Navy could actively repair only one at a time. The rest relied on temporary above-ground utility lines, and at least one pier had to lower its weight rating for safety — reducing the number of ships it could service.
Back at Minot, officials poured roughly $3.5 million into patching a B-52 parking apron that outlived its expected lifespan by more than three decades instead of replacing it. GAO suggested the stopgap approach probably made the eventual fix more expensive.
Housing conditions produce some of the report’s most disturbing findings. At Norfolk, housing officials identified suspected mold in a barracks closet in late 2023 but declined to test for it, citing the cost.
They closed off the room and an adjacent one, cleaned with off-the-shelf products, and moved on. As of February 2026 — more than two years later — the mold had still not been formally addressed. GAO notes that a different Norfolk barracks had already been fully condemned after an earlier mold problem went untreated. Elsewhere on the base, sailors and airmen stood fire watch for over a year after fire suppression systems and hangar doors broke — in one instance following an electrical fire — because the replacement equipment hadn’t arrived.
Understaffing made everything worse. All 10 joint bases with available data had unfilled maintenance positions, with staffing levels ranging from 68 to 97% of authorized strength. At Marine Corps Base Hawaii, a single plumber covered an entire installation with multiple barracks, producing backlogs the base couldn’t dig out from. Little Rock Air Force Base lost nearly half its maintenance staff to a combination of hiring freezes, the administration’s deferred resignation program, and other workforce reductions, according to Air Force officials cited in the report.
Even tracking the problem has proven elusive. Each service logs work orders in a different database, and when GAO tried to analyze a full year of that data, the numbers weren’t reliable enough to compare completion rates across branches. Of the 37 customer organizations GAO interviewed, 22 said installation maintenance offices could generally handle emergencies but routinely fell behind on everything else. Seventeen reported seeing work orders marked closed before the underlying problem was actually fixed.
GAO issued 13 recommendations; most pressing the Pentagon to formally assess and report the risks of chronic underfunding rather than treating the shortfall as an unavoidable consequence of tight budgets. The department agreed with seven, partially agreed with five, and rejected the recommendation that it strengthen cross-service oversight of maintenance programs. It cited a two-person office with too few staff to take on the job.
