Newsweek, Dec. 4, 2019: Military Families Live In Housing With Mice And Mold, And Congress Wants ‘Slumlords’ And Top Brass Held Accountable
A Senate hearing Tuesday made it clear that the Pentagon needs to get its house in order. All of its houses, in fact. Families of service members affected by substandard living conditions on military installations heard little more than apologies and promises from service secretaries and chiefs, even as a new report shows that military housing remains a problem.
In a roughly two-hour hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, lawmakers and the top brass of the Defense Department discussed the results of a recent report from the Government Accountability Office. The report found that military oversight of physical living conditions is limited in some cases. Meanwhile, the metrics developed to gauge the performance of the private companies that control housing on U.S. military bases may not be accurately assessing what housing conditions are like. For example, a Pentagon report from May 2019 said the overall resident satisfaction rate for 2017 was 87%.
