Summary

  • DOD estimated $285 billion in deferred maintenance in fiscal 2025, up from $137 billion in fiscal 2020. Its 2014 goal is to fund routine facility sustainment at 90% of a modelled need; Army, Navy and Air Force requests generally ran near 80% during fiscal 2021–25.
  • GAO could not calculate a trustworthy on-time repair rate from service work-order records. Standards differed, data were unreliable, and the central division for overall guidance and oversight had two government employees with occasional contractor support.
  • The question for Congress is which delayed repairs threaten missions or the lives of personnel. DOD has not made that department-wide risk assessment, even as local offices defer work and the backlog grows.

A pier can lose its weight rating before a budget loses its composure

At Naval Station Norfolk, officials told federal auditors that several piers needed renovation, while the Navy was actively improving one. One pier had its weight rating lowered. Other piers relied on temporary utilities laid above ground because built-in systems no longer worked, adding cost and restricting vehicles. That is what a maintenance backlog looks like when it stops being a balance-sheet noun: a berth with less capacity and a workaround that becomes ordinary.

The Government Accountability Office's August 2026 report puts the Department of Defense's estimated deferred-maintenance stock at $285 billion in fiscal 2025, compared with $137 billion five years earlier. DOD reported more than 736,000 facilities worldwide worth about $2.6 trillion. These are DOD estimates, and the backlog is a stock of deferred work, not a bill payable next Tuesday. The operational question is who gets to decide which deferral is tolerable and on what evidence.

The department's own 2014 policy aimed to fund routine sustainment at no less than 90% of the Facilities Sustainment Model estimate. For fiscal 2021–25, the Army, Navy and Air Force generally requested roughly 80%. Marine Corps requests fell from 80% to 40%; officials said it was shifting money toward restoration and modernization projects. A different use of facilities money may be defensible. The missing piece is a comparable account of the risk accepted when maintenance loses that contest.

GAO visited or contacted eight installations selected for diagnostic reasons, not statistical representation. All eight reported less sustainment funding than the model recommended; none met the 90% goal. Their five-year averages ranged from 37% at Andersen Air Force Base and 40% at Minot to 83% at Fort Benning. The percentages do not establish that a given pipe or pier failed for lack of funds. They show how far local budget practice can sit below the department's stated standard.

A work order that headquarters cannot read

The services apply different definitions of timely repair. GAO tried to calculate on-time completion using their work-order files and found the records insufficiently reliable for that analysis. The Navy and Marine Corps assessed timeliness at service level with different detail; the Army could not document such an assessment; Air Force officials said they did not perform one at service level. Without a common, dependable measure, a low-cost repair completed promptly and a mission-critical job postponed for months can disappear into incomparable dashboards.

This is a staffing and authority problem as well as a data problem. Military departments and installations employ the workers and manage the actual facilities. GAO says the division in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations, and Environment responsible for overall maintenance and repair guidance and procedures has just two government employees, with occasional contractor support. Those two people do not maintain 736,000 facilities. They sit at the narrow central point where standards, reporting and oversight should connect the services.

GAO found no Office of the Secretary of Defense policy to oversee installation maintenance performance and no specified service performance reports to that office.

The labor picture is no tidier. Local offices described hiring difficulty, especially in remote places, but the military departments had not fully assessed shortages across installations or produced service-wide strategies. An individual base cannot change federal hiring rules or create a national pool of skilled tradespeople. Leaving each installation to solve the shortage turns a department-wide constraint into a series of local excuses.

GAO recommended thirteen changes, including assessments of the mission and quality-of-life risks from underfunding and repair backlogs, more reliable work-order data, and annual service performance information against improved standards. DOD concurred with seven, partly concurred with five and rejected one. In response to the risk-assessment recommendation, it cited local plans and financial reports of backlogs. GAO's answer was precise: those records had not been assembled into a department-level account of what the deferred work would do to missions and people.

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