The U.S. military’s system for moving household goods is entering its busiest time of the year amid significant uncertainty: It’s unclear precisely how service members’ belongings will get from place to place given mounting indications the Defense Department’s multibillion-dollar contract for handling those shipments is nowhere near ready for full implementation.
After several years of legal and operational setbacks, U.S. Transportation Command hoped the $17.9 billion Global Household Goods (GHC) contract would be ready to handle all of the military’s stateside moves by this summer’s peak season. But there are strong signs that DoD will need to turn to the hundreds of moving companies that make up its legacy “tender for service” system for the bulk of this summer’s work, even though many of those companies scaled back operations in anticipation of the long-delayed GHC contract finally transitioning moves to the vendor, HomeSafe Alliance.
TRANSCOM declined to answer specific questions about how many moves could actually be conducted under GHC this summer, saying only that its implementation of the contract was always intended to be “conditions-based.” The most recent data TRANSCOM was willing to provide — through the beginning of April — showed that GHC had been assigned about 25% of DoD’s moving volume. However, 1,600 of the moves that were initially assigned to the contract were eventually “turned back” to the tender system between December 2024 and April 2025 because of GHC capacity limitations.
TRANSCOM did not provide further data to contextualize the full number of moves affected.
In an April 30 memo, the Army, GHC’s largest customer, told all of its base-level shipping offices to stop booking new moves under the contract “until further notice,” and to be prepared to process turn-backs of planned GHC moves so that they could be rebooked under the tender system.
A separate Marine Corps notice shared with Federal News Network indicated that service is taking similar steps and said shipping offices were pulling May, June and July shipments from the GHC contract.
In a conference call with investors last week, Stuart Bradie, the CEO of KBR — one of HomeSafe’s two parent companies — acknowledged that the contract would not see a significant ramp-up of activity during the summer as expected.
“Our mission is to improve the move experience of the service men and women, while saving taxpayers money as we replace the inefficient and costly legacy program,” he said. “We continue to work with TRANSCOM to synchronize moves to supplier capacity. This synchronization is healthy for the long-term program, as it emphasizes quality and timeliness of the moves first. We accordingly expect pace of move growth to be modest in [the second quarter], with incremental step-ups in [the second and third quarters]. The HomeSafe-TRANSCOM relationship is strong, with a commitment on both sides to make this program successful.”
Moving industry officials who work under the tender system expressed frustration that TRANSCOM had not provided them with a forecast of how much moving volume DoD would ask them to handle in the coming months. Multiple companies told Federal News Network they have already seen a significant increase in DoD orders marked as “turn backs” from GHC.
The reasons for those turn backs are not always clear, but HomeSafe has struggled to attract companies to work as subcontractors in the numbers needed to handle DoD’s moving demands because, according to moving industry officials, the rates paid under the contract are substantially lower than in the existing system.
In January, TRANSCOM issued a formal “show cause” notice to HomeSafe indicating it was concerned that the company was not meeting the terms of the GHC contract. At that point, during the slowest period of the year for military moves, about 1,000 families had already experienced no-shows or had other significant problems with their moves. TRANSCOM on Friday declined to provide an updated tally of missed pickups in response to Federal News Network’s questions.
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