The Marine Corps touted its ongoing barracks improvements on Tuesday but acknowledged the effort has hit some early snags -- and uncertain funding from Congress threatens to extend the already far-off expected completion in the late 2030s by nearly a decade.
The improvement effort, known as Barracks 2030, is a top priority for the commandant, Gen. Eric Smith, and has added furniture, renovations and big-ticket items such as air conditioning to the on-base housing, which is home to more than 80,000 Marines. But at least one pilot program is at risk of fizzling out for legal reasons, and the Pentagon's ongoing hiring freeze has delayed bringing on more than 100 civilian housing specialists.
Meanwhile, funding may be the biggest challenge for the initiative, according to presentations this week at the Modern Day Marine expo in Washington, D.C. If Congress does not allocate enough money in the next several years -- a total price tag of roughly $11 billion -- Barracks 2030 could get pushed into the 2040s, long after most current junior Marines have left the barracks.
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"There are still many areas where our Marines -- for the next year or two -- will not live in conditions that we want them to, but we are actively getting after," said Maj. Gen. Jason Woodworth, head of Marine Corps Installations Command, or MCICOM, who also oversees the service's facilities. "That's why it's going to take us to 2037 if fully funded" to get facilities where they need to be.
While Marine Corps officials said barracks conditions were improving, they have not been adequate homes in recent years for Marines. As of March 2023, 17,000 Marines were living in substandard housing, according to a Government Accountability Report that year, citing information from service leaders.
Military.com reported early last year that Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, California, had a pilot program where eight staff noncommissioned officers moved into the barracks "for the purpose of advocacy, mentorship, and the maintenance of good order and discipline for all residents," Maj. John Parry, a spokesperson for MCICOM, said at the time.
It was likened to a resident adviser program, such as those common at universities, and mirrors a similar Navy program. But more than a year later, that program may be in jeopardy because of a legal issue revolving around how many entitlements those staff NCOs would receive under the initiative.
"We ran into some legality issues," Eric Mason, the unaccompanied housing team lead for MCICOM, said Tuesday during a presentation at the expo. "It seems that our Marine Corps legal team doesn't see things the way the Navy sees them, meaning that if we have a senior or staff personnel that lives in the barracks that are getting [basic allowance for housing], it requires them to have two entitlements. And we couldn't get behind that. So our legal team is still looking at how we do this."
Another such initiative was to replace Marine barracks managers with trained civilians. Previously, young Marines were charged with handling barracks, from managing repair requests to in-processing newcomers into housing, juggling those difficult responsibilities with their military duties.
Now, Mason said the service has hired and trained 347 civilians across the fleet whose sole focus is to manage the day-to-day operations of the barracks. That took 532 enlisted Marines off the hook for those responsibilities, according to Mason's presentation.
The Pentagon's recent hiring freeze under the Trump administration has delayed the staffing of 115 of those civilian barracks managers who were supposed to be onboarded in February, Mason said. He said the service plans to hire those individuals once the freeze is lifted.
"How do we measure success at the end of 2037, or 2045, or however long we go to, how do we measure if [the] Barracks 2030 initiative was successful?" Mason said.
Tracking progress data was one way to identify the program's outcomes, Mason said, but he added that another litmus test will be to gauge how Marines feel about the barracks being their "home."
"No Marines identify barracks as home," he said. "When you start hearing Marines say I am going to my home, and they're referring to barracks, I think that's a great way to measure" the program's success.
Mason could not provide an exact number of how many Marines are currently living in substandard housing, but said "that [17,000] number has decreased and will continue to decrease" as the service works to fulfill its initiative, hopefully by the mid-2030s.
Much of that progress relies on steady funding from Congress. Mason said that "if, for some reason, God forbid, we don't get all the money we're asking for, then we have a backup plan, an alternate plan, which takes [us] out to about 2045, 2043, depending on how much we end up getting."
Meanwhile, the service has poured the facilities money it currently has into barracks renovations as well as programs and systems in the near term.
In 2023, MCICOM saw to it that installations began using QR codes to generate barracks maintenance requests. By the fall of that year, the division began developing a program called QSRMax that is meant to institutionalize the practice. Now, the system is getting 1,000 requests per week, officials said.
Officials added that a pilot program at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, South Carolina, will begin soon allowing Marines to use their Common Access Card, or CAC, to enter their barracks instead of having to rely on key cards that may get lost more frequently.
Last spring, the service completed a massive wall-to-wall inspection of more than 60,000 barracks rooms around the world. A year later, the Marine Corps has not released the results of that effort, but Maj. Jose Castillo, an official with MCICOM, said it has directly informed their efforts.
Common trends that officials saw included "water intrusions," meaning plumbing issues and leaks, ventilation and security concerns regarding broken locks, for example.
Castillo and other officials said the Marine Corps has contracted the Urban Collaborative LLC design firm to collect data on the entire Marine Corps portfolio of unaccompanied housing and provide the service with data in the next year or so.
"This is going to tell us what barracks we need to keep, what barracks we need to refurbish or renovate, and what barracks we simply need to get rid of," Mason said.
The company did not immediately return Military.com's request for an interview on Wednesday.
Service leaders have admitted barracks fell by the wayside during the Global War on Terrorism. Poor conditions such as squatters, mold, vermin, ventilation issues and general dilapidation became common.
"The idea is not to fix it and forget it. It's to fix it directly and then maintain it," Lt. Gen. James Adams III, the deputy commandant for programs and resources, said on Tuesday. "Because, quite frankly, we got ourselves in the position we're in now because we didn't fix it and we did forget it."
