The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has now confirmed what service members and families already knew from bitter experience: U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) failed them in the rollout of the $17.9 billion Global Household Goods Contract (GHC). Missed pickups, last-minute cancellations, delayed deliveries, and property damage were not isolated mishaps but symptoms of a systemic breakdown that GAO documented in detail.
The GAO report shows that TRANSCOM awarded the contract without verifying capacity, failed to oversee execution, paid for services never rendered, and applied reporting practices that concealed the worst failures. Despite documenting these failures and more, the GAO report offered only a single recommendation: collect better data. It made no call for accountability from the leaders responsible for the GHC debacle.
Awarding Without Verification
The GAO substantiated that TRANSCOM knew contractor capacity was a “key risk” but pressed forward anyway. The command lacked detailed information on subcontractors and industry resources, meaning it could not verify whether HomeSafe Alliance could meet peak demand. Instead of requiring evidence of proven capability, TRANSCOM relied on assumptions and promises. What makes this more striking is that HomeSafe Alliance was not an established industry leader but a brand-new venture. It had no institutional experience, no track record in managing household goods at scale, and no demonstrated ability to handle the global demands of U.S. military relocations. TRANSCOM’s decision left service members and their families dependent on an untested company, one that had never conducted a single move.
Failed Oversight
The GAO found that, once the contract was awarded, TRANSCOM failed to maintain meaningful visibility over contractor capacity, performance, or costs. More damaging, its own survey process erased the program’s worst breakdowns. When HomeSafe Alliance canceled or failed to show on moving day and the move reverted to the legacy system, TRANSCOM excluded those service members from customer satisfaction surveys, a deliberate omission GAO confirmed in its report. By TRANSCOM’s design, HomeSafe Alliance’s worst failures were scrubbed from the official record, and the families who suffered the most were silenced.
Paying for Services Never Rendered
TRANSCOM’s financial negligence compounded the collapse. The GAO found that the DoD spent over $100 million on transition costs to stand up HomeSafe Alliance’s IT systems, staffing, and infrastructure for GHC. When the program failed, those investments did not revert to the government. HomeSafe Alliance kept the money and the systems built with it, leaving taxpayers with nothing in return. On top of that, TRANSCOM allowed HomeSafe Alliance to collect management fees for shipments it never executed. Even when moves were canceled or reassigned to the legacy system, TRANSCOM repeatedly failed to recover the payments. In effect, TRANSCOM subsidized HomeSafe Alliance’s business while families were left to cover hotel bills, rental expenses, and personally procured moves out of their own pockets.
Misleading Congress
In the spring of 2025, TRANSCOM leadership testified to Congress that complaints were declining and claimed this was proof the program was stabilizing. What TRANSCOM did not disclose was that the decline was the result of the Army abandoning HomeSafe Alliance and ordering its transportation officers to revert to the legacy system. With fewer families being pushed through GHC, the number of complaints naturally declined, not because HomeSafe Alliance or TRANSCOM had fixed anything, but because the DoD’s largest service had withdrawn from the collapsing program.
GAO’s Weak Recommendation
Despite documenting these failures in detail, the GAO offered only a single recommendation: that the DoD obtain more comprehensive data on capacity, performance, and costs for future contracts. This simplistic recommendation minimizes the seriousness of TRANSCOM’s failures. The report made clear what went wrong but said nothing about who was responsible. It stopped short of calling for an investigation into senior leaders whose poor decisions, lack of oversight, and misleading testimony wasted more than $100 million in taxpayer funds, put tens of billions more at risk, and disrupted tens of thousands of military families. In essence, GAO’s response reduced a crisis of leadership and oversight to a matter of better spreadsheets.
Accountability Must Extend to Leadership
The collapse of the GHC did not happen in a vacuum. It unfolded under the derelict leadership of three consecutive TRANSCOM commanders, each of whom had the authority to intervene but instead chose to push a broken program forward to protect their reputations rather than fulfill their obligations to service members, their families, and the American taxpayers.
General Stephen Lyons, who commanded TRANSCOM from 2018 to 2021, personally pushed the single-vendor model and forced the award through despite clear warnings. While industry leaders and consultants warned that no single company could reasonably handle worldwide military moves, Lyons pressed on with what he likely saw as his legacy project. He ignored those capacity risks and locked the military into a fragile structure from the outset. By embedding those flaws into the foundation of GHC, Lyons ensured that families would be forced to gamble on a contractor that had never proven it could meet global demand.
General Jacqueline Van Ovost, who succeeded Lyons in 2021, made the decision to move forward with the rollout despite lacking the information needed to manage it responsibly. Even as HomeSafe Alliance’s failures mounted, she pressed ahead rather than pausing to reassess or impose corrective action. Instead of stepping in to slow or halt the program, Van Ovost doubled down, defending a system she knew was not working. When Congress pressed her in 2024 about obvious risks, she dismissed the concerns with vague assurances, choosing to protect the program and herself instead of the service members and families it was failing.
General Randall Reed inherited a collapsing system in 2024 and was in a perfect position to intervene decisively and bring an end to TRANSCOM’s failure. Instead of acknowledging that the GHC was collapsing and pushing for change, he kept the DoD on a collision course to failure. Appearing before both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees in early 2025, Reed could have secured bipartisan support to shut it down. Instead, he misled Congress with reassurances drawn from intentionally distorted data, while service members and their families paid the price.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the DoD terminated its contract with HomeSafe Alliance after its failures became too big for TRANSCOM leaders to conceal or explain away with misleading data. Yet the commanders who drove, presided over, and misrepresented this debacle remain untouched. The GAO’s lone recommendation avoided the real issue: holding senior leaders accountable for their decisions. Lyons, Van Ovost, and Reed put GHC, HomeSafe Alliance, and their own reputations ahead of their duty to safeguard the well-being of the hundreds of thousands of service members and family members who relocate across the globe each year. Until these commanders are held to account, GHC will serve as yet another example of how the DoD refuses to hold its senior leaders responsible for even the most consequential of failures.
Note: United States Transportation Command acknowledged the author’s request for comment but failed to provide a substantive response.