The Trump administration’s broad effort to detain and deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally has come with a bitter pill for Congress, as the White House is poised to shift money away from Pentagon plans to improve military housing.
In 2024, Congress voted overwhelmingly to increase resources for military “quality of life” programs, starting with upgrades to base housing.
But under President Donald Trump, White House officials looked at those funds and licked their chops, hatching plans to shift $1 billion from barracks improvements into border security and immigration enforcement operations.
“We all know that privatized family housing at DOD (Department of Defense) installations is a mess,” U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., said at a hearing on military construction this week.
Ossoff isn’t the only one raising red flags in Congress. Gen. Randy George, chief of staff of the Army, got an earful at a recent hearing from both parties.
“It’s very troubling,” U.S. Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., said of the raid on Army housing money.
U.S. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., also weighed in. “There is no way that you should be allowed to move a billion dollars’ worth of money from barracks — that we worked so hard to give you — into something like the border.”
This isn’t new. During Trump’s first term in office, he siphoned off around $1 billion in military personnel money to fund the construction of about 60 miles of border wall.
Another sore point for lawmakers is that the president’s “big beautiful” tax and budget bill is expected to include $900 million for military construction — but that’s likely to be used for migrant detention facilities at military bases, not to improve and fix base housing.
Like the National Weather Service and the National Park Service, Congress has long underfunded military housing needs, leaving a terrible trail of substandard living conditions for active-duty troops and their families.
Ossoff has dug into those stories repeatedly, asking military families at installations in Georgia to send in tips on the problems they encounter in base housing.
The stories are much the same in Georgia and at military bases all across the country: health and safety concerns, mold, substandard maintenance and respiratory illnesses among kids.
“If service members can’t live, eat, train and work in safe, healthy, world-class facilities, our readiness is undermined, and so is morale,” Ossoff said this week.
But there’s a big difference between highlighting substandard military housing and getting the Pentagon to fix it.
And right now, the Trump administration sees fighting illegal immigration as a more pressing need.
“You have to make choices,” the Army’s chief of staff told lawmakers.
It’s not the choice that some in Congress would make.
Jamie Dupree has covered national politics and Congress from Washington, D.C., since the Reagan administration. His column appears weekly in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. For more, check out his Capitol Hill newsletter at http://jamiedupree.substack.com
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