The $17.9 Billion Contract That Moved a Tenth of What It Promised

Every year the Pentagon arranges roughly 300,000 household-goods moves for service members and their families, at a cost of about $2 billion, through a decades-old system called Tender of Service (ToS).▸ Fed up with its chronic problems — drop-and-run movers, damaged goods, no accountability — U.S. Transportation Command signed a single commercial contractor, HomeSafe Alliance, to a Global Household Goods Contract (GHC) worth up to $17.9 billion over roughly nine years in November 2021. It was supposed to replace ToS entirely. Instead, per a Government Accountability Office audit released in September 2025, TRANSCOM terminated the contract on June 18, 2025, after it proved unable to handle even a modest fraction of the volume it was built for.

HomeSafe told TRANSCOM it could manage about 200,000 shipments a year.▸ Limited GHC shipments didn't begin until April 2024 — two and a half years after the award — and from then through the June 2025 termination, TRANSCOM assigned the contractor roughly 20,000 shipments in total. Even at that scale, GAO found the contractor couldn't keep up: TRANSCOM terminated about 7,400 of those task orders outright for the contractor's "failure to meet performance requirements or lack of capacity," and separately had to pull another roughly 6,700 assigned shipments back into the legacy ToS system at the contractor's own request, just to make sure families still moved. On the numbers TRANSCOM did track, from January through June 2025 the contractor picked up only 64% of shipments on time and delivered just 58% on time — meaning more than a third of pickups and 42% of deliveries missed schedule.

The money tells the same story from a different angle.▸ Total GHC shipment costs invoiced to date came to about $24 million as of April 2025 — one year after GHC shipments began, against a contract that could have run to $17.9 billion and a legacy system that alone costs DOD roughly $2 billion every year. Meanwhile the administrative side of standing GHC up kept growing: the contract initially set aside $54 million over nine months for IT integration and transition costs, then TRANSCOM added up to $60 million more in February 2024 to keep the transition moving — a combined ceiling of $114 million just to build the plumbing, before most of the shipments it was meant to carry ever moved through it.

DOD even paid for work that was never done.▸ Under the contract terms, the military services paid HomeSafe an up-front management fee of about $563 per move task order — including for orders later terminated or handed back for non-performance. TRANSCOM demanded roughly $3.2 million back to cover fees already paid on those ~7,400 terminated orders; as of June 2025, per GAO, HomeSafe was appealing the terminations, litigation was ongoing, and none of it had been repaid.

Every one of those missed or terminated shipments was a military family — someone who had to keep working with a mover TRANSCOM had already flagged as failing, or get bounced back into the legacy system mid-move.▸ GAO's own survey of service members and spouses who moved under the GHC turned up "inadequate communication," multi-phase delays, and at least one family that went more than $10,000 into debt covering a move themselves after the contractor fell through.

Whichever system the Pentagon uses, the moves still have to be carried out by the same national pool of movers, packers, and truck drivers.▸ That pool is shrinking. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, the household-goods moving industry (NAICS 484210) employed an average of 98,498 people nationally in 2023. In 2024 — the same year GHC shipments were ramping up and failing — that fell to 93,872, a loss of 4,626 jobs, or 4.7% of the industry's workforce, in a single year. GAO's own interviews point to the same root cause TRANSCOM cited for HomeSafe's failure: "a lack of a sufficient subcontractor network — also known as industry capacity." The contractor didn't just overstate its own capabilities; it was drawing from a labor pool that was contracting under it.

Figures on GHC contract terms, shipment volumes, and performance are drawn from GAO-25-107771 (September 2025) and reflect the period from the contract's November 2021 award through its June 18, 2025 termination. Moving-industry employment figures are BLS QCEW annual averages for calendar years 2023 and 2024, the most recent full year available at publication; 2025 data was not yet published by BLS at the time of writing.