Hearings to examine the Senior Enlisted Leaders on servicemember and family quality of life.
Senate Subcommittee on Personnel
2026-02-11
Source: Congress.gov
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Transcript
Good afternoon. This hearing will come to order. The Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel meets this afternoon to hear from the senior enlisted leaders of armed forces about quality of life investments across the Department of Defense. I want to thank all of our witnesses for joining us today and for their service and to our country. You all represent the backbone of our military. Enlisted service members make up more than 80%. of the total force and you are the voice of those who serve us every day. You see morale, discipline, and readiness up close. We value that perspective and we need it. I commend the services for returning their focus to war fighting and lethality and for moving away from distracted DEI programs that do not strengthen combat effectiveness. Our military exists to fight and to win and to win wars. High standards and discipline matter. I strongly support returning to a culture focused on performance and mission. You know, at the same time, quality of life is a core readiness issue. The department invests billions of tax dollars in critical warfighting capabilities, and rightly so. But too often, the most basic investments that directly support service members day to day, like housing, dining, facilities, and family support, are treated As secondary, taking care of the things that take care of our service members is not a distraction from readiness. It is foundational to it. In recent years, the Armed Services Committee, and this subcommittee in particular, has prioritized investments to support service members and their families, including increasing pay, expanding access to child care, improving spouse employment opportunities, and strengthening military health care. We did this because taking care of our people is essential to maintaining a strong and capable military.
This hearing is an opportunity to circle back and find out whether those investments have resulted in meaningful improvements and where our gaps still exist. We also want to hear directly from you about the initiatives you are leading to support morale and quality of life across your formations. The goal today is to get honest feedback, identify, what needs improvement and ensure both Congress and the department are focused on their most important asset, the men and women in uniform. So thank you for all appearing today. I look forward to your testimony. And ranking member and Senator Warren, your statement, please. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'm glad that we're taking time to dig into important quality of life issues for our enlisted troops.
You know, enlisted members make up over 80% of our active duty forces. They fill critical jobs across the services from intelligence and cyber specialists to engineers and infantrymen, all crucial to upholding our national security. But too often, these patriotic men and women have to deal with quality of life issues that make it harder for them to effectively do their jobs. One big area of concern is the quality of our barracks. We require service members who enlist to live in barracks during basic training and initial job training. The very minimum we owe them is housing that is safe Instead, we've seen health and safety problems for decades. A 2023 report by the Government Accountability Office was another wake-up call on this issue. The GAO found mold-covered walls, sewage pipes that were cracking and overflowing, and rooms heating up to over 90 degrees because the air conditioning units were broken. Several years later, we continue to hear horror stories about living conditions. Navy Secretary John Phelan was so, quote, appalled by barracks he visited in Guam that he initially thought the buildings he was visiting were condemned. Troops and other services also continue to report that it can take months to address maintenance requests at their barracks. Look, we need real solutions, and we need them now, not years from now, now. And one of the proposed solutions is turning responsibility for these barracks over to private companies instead. I am deeply concerned that we have not learned our lessons from years of this committee's investigations into privatized military family housing, which exposed significant failures.
Military family housing is still plagued by supports of unsafe living conditions like mold, lead paint, pest infestations, and more. I sent a letter to Secretary Hegseth last year raising concerns about this. DOD's response indicated that it is poised to make exactly the same mistakes in privatizing the enlisted person's barracks, like granting 50-year leases to companies with questionable accountability and virtually no oversight. We've also seen private companies try to take advantage of military families by forcing them to sign non-disclosure agreements in order to receive compensation for things like damaged property from mold or reimbursement for other financial burdens that they face due to terrible living conditions. DOD and Congress need to act so that any companies responsible for privatized barracks
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