Watchdog Blames PCS Contractor Debacle in Part on Lack of Military Oversight

The combatant command charged with managing military personnel moves failed to adequately oversee the performance of a contractor it hired to handle tens of thousands of shipments of service members’ household goods, which contributed to the failure of the contract and a miserable moving experience for many troops and their families, a government watchdog found.

In 2021, U.S. Transportation Command awarded a Global Household Goods Contract worth $17.9 billion over nine years to a commercial move manager called HomeSafe Alliance. As part of the deal, HomeSafe was expected to oversee a network of subcontractors to pack, store, and transport the household goods of Active-Duty service members and their families.

The goal was to improve service members’ move experience and hold movers accountable for poor performance. Instead, TRANSCOM terminated about 7,400 shipments out of 20,000 initiated with HomeSafe “due to the contractor’s failure to meet performance requirements or lack of capacity to manage the shipments,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in a report published Sept. 11.

The GHC went operational in April 2024, but by May 2025, advocates and lawmakers said more than 1,000 military families reported household move failures such as missed pickups and delivery issues. 

“[We attempted] to coordinate for over three weeks, no solution was provided, and no one was available to pick up our goods,” one service member told GAO. “This delay forced us to extend our lease, resulting in additional out-of-pocket expenses and placing strain on our relationship with our landlord.”

In June, the services began shifting moves back to the old system, before eventually terminating the GHC altogether that same month. But the implementation could have gone better if TRANSCOM and the wider Defense Department had done a better job gathering information about and overseeing HomeSafe, GAO wrote.

Specifically, TRANSCOM officials did not gauge if HomeSafe had the capacity to manage organizing so many moves at once. It also had incomplete information regarding the costs of the transition, leading to cost overruns. The Defense Department also lacked comprehensive feedback on service members’ experience with HomeSafe, which limited its assessment of contractor performance, GAO said.

Before GHC, some 800 private moving contractors worked directly with the military service shipping offices. After GHC, those contractors would work as potential subcontractors for HomeSafe, which TRANSCOM hoped would provide service members a single point of contact, as well as the ability to manage and track their shipments online.

The Defense Department arranges about 300,000 personal property shipments for troops and families every year, a figure TRANSCOM knew for years would be a lot to take on for whoever won the GHC contract. In 2020, a consulting company called the Logistics Management Institute recommended TRANSCOM conduct follow-on analyses for capacity risk for whoever won the GHC contract, but the command never did so, and the Defense Department never addressed how TRANSCOM would oversee capacity risk, GAO wrote.

“Despite identifying capacity as a risk to successful contract implementation, TRANSCOM did not collect sufficient information to conduct effective oversight of contractor capacity during GHC implementation,” the watchdog said.

The key problem was that HomeSafe set compensation rates that were much lower than market rates for moving services, which meant fewer companies could make a profit. That led to fewer companies participating, and not enough capacity to handle the demand. TRANSCOM officials told GAO “they did not have visibility into the rates the GHC contractor paid subcontractors,” the watchdog said. 

That left military families with shoddy contractors.

“I called [the contractor] two days before the move as I did not receive any coordination for the move,” one service member told GAO. “When I called, the agent told me they forgot to schedule me.”

The GHC also did not require HomeSafe to continuously send TRANSCOM detailed information about its capacity, and the information it did provide “misrepresented the contractor’s capacity to manage shipments,” GAO said. Between February and April 2025, TRANSCOM moved about 6,700 shipments back into the old system at HomeSafe’s request, causing “substantial additional work” for the military’s personal property shipping offices.

“Without accurate information regarding capacity to manage the risk to contract implementation, the volume of shipments TRANSCOM ordered from the contractor exceeded the contractor’s realistic capacity, resulting in performance failures and impacts on military families,” the watchdog said. 

The military also failed to properly gauge HomeSafe’s performance. Specifically, when the GHC process botched a move and the move was transferred to the old system, the family received a survey from TRANSCOM for the old system but not for the GHC contractor’s shoddy pickup services, which limited TRANSCOM’s awareness of GHC performance. The military shipping offices also had less authority to intervene directly on quality issues than they used to, since all issues now had go through TRANSCOM and HomeSafe on their way to the subcontractor. 

On top of all that, the different information technology systems used by the government and the contractor led to data inconsistencies which made it tough to schedule inspections and make sure moves went as planned.

Lack of comprehensive information meant costs kept going up as the Defense Department paid for a growing list of administrative expenses and IT development and integration problems. And despite GHC being intended to provide more accountability, TRANSCOM wound up paying about $3.2 million for about 7,400 terminated task orders, with no reimbursement expected as of June 2025, GAO said.

What happens next for PCS reform is unclear. In May, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood up a PCS task force to address troops’ concerns, and a June press release said the task force would grow to more than 50 members with a 24/7 call center to help troops and families resolve issues.

“At the end of the day, there were a lot of good things about GHC as a transformation initiative that really made the system better,” task force head Army Maj. Gen. Lance G. Curtis said in the release. “The problem was the contractor was not meeting our expectations.” 

Because of the termination, the vast majority of PCS moves this year are being run through the old system, which had to scale up at the last minute to meet an unexpected surge in demand. 

Curtis said future contracts “have to have oversight responsibilities and there have to be consequences tied to the accountability,” adding that he would seek feedback from service members and families as he comes up with options for Hegseth to improve the process later this year.

In August, the task force hosted an industry day, where government and industry representatives warned against future single-source solutions, according to DefenseScoop. 

As the Defense Department figures out what to do next, the GAO recommended that the defense secretary make sure his office and TRANSCOM obtain the comprehensive information on capacity, performance, and costs that they failed to gather under GHC.

Curtis wrote in response that the Defense Department agreed with the recommendation.