Hegseth adviser to barracks task force cites black mold, lack of hot water as common problems facing service members

In his first month on the job, Dakota Meyer, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s senior adviser on the barracks task force, has relocated service members from their assigned housing due to unattended, unlivable conditions across multiple installations.Meyer, a Medal of Honor recipient who was assigned to represent the secretary on the task force on Oct. 19, has traveled to seven military installations since then, expects to hit about 30 by the end of the year, and intends to visit overseas bases early next year.He’s visited Naval Air Station Pensacola; Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina; Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, South Carolina; Moody Air Force Base, Georgia; and Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California; among others. He visited Marine Corps Air Station Miramar prior to his appointment as senior adviser to the secretary from the task force, which he has been a part of since July. After going to several bases, Meyer came back to the Pentagon and asked Hegseth to sign a memorandum that laid out “what the expectation was in order to immediately triage this issue,” he told reporters at a Defense Writers Group event on Friday. The goal is to provide every service member a living space that is “clean, safe, and comfortable immediately,” and if that’s not happening, affected service members should be quickly relocated.“That’s why this memo that just came out was so important, setting that expectation that if they’re not in a place that’s clean, safe, and comfortable, we will do whatever it takes to get them immediately to a place that’s clean, safe, and comfortable,” he said, adding that he believes this policy should be applicable across services uniformly.Meyer said troops have been forced to deal with black mold, a lack of hot water, and nonworking air conditioning, among other problems.During one of his visits, a 19-year-old female service member said all she wanted was to take “a hot shower once a week,” while another service member, he said, had been forced to sleep in their car because the air conditioning was out.He shut down an entire living facility that lacked hot water for 45 days, though they were able to restore it the day after the visit.“The scale is big, but again, like it’s fixable when you prioritize this and you make it a priority and you make not fixing this unacceptable,” he said, though he later acknowledged that what he saw at both Moody Air Force Base and Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, South Carolina, met his standards.Mr. Dakota Meyer, senior adviser to the secretary of War, barracks task force, speaks with Airman Apprentice Joseph Davis and Airman Apprentice Carter Solomon, both assigned to the Naval Aviation Schools Command, during an Unaccompanied Housing tour onboard Naval Air Station Pensacola, Nov. 3, 2026. (U.S. Navy photo by Chief Mass Communication Specialist Ian Cotter) The service members he has interacted with aren’t “looking for luxury,” rather, all they want are “the same things that each and every one of us in this room live with every day and never even think about,” he said, adding that the notion that “this generation” is “selfish” and “entitled” doesn’t match with the service members he has met who “look at me all the time and they’re like ‘If we can get a class on and get some drywall and some spackling and some paint, we’ll go fix the holes ourselves.’“They don’t expect somebody else to fix them,” he said. “They’re majority of time, they’re all willing to be part of that solution.”Meyer also pointed out that these current issues have been “decades of buildup of mismanagement of funding, of reprioritization of funding,” and singled out Congress, which is in charge of appropriations, as one of the reasons causing the problems.‘MY REAL NIGHTMARES’: EVOLVING TECHNOLOGY AND WEAPONS ARE CHANGING MILITARY BASES AND FUTURE PLANS“There is a huge money problem on this, and we need to get a budget across right now,” he said. “We’re sitting on a continuing resolution. We need to get these things passed. We still have to make sure that we can get those dollars to direct impacts of service members as fast as we can, and that’s a process that we have to address.”Meyer summed up the issue: “You have a war fighting machine that’s trying to manage one of the largest housing portfolios that exists. It makes about as much sense as if we had a real estate portfolio or housing management company trying to manage a war fighting machine.”