The Pentagon's Hidden Housing Scandal: Outsourcing Duty Of Care

Authored by Jay Rogers via RealClearDefense,

Sen. Jon Ossoff released a report on July 8 documenting lead exposure in a newborn, mold-related emergency room visits, and a cockroach infestation living inside a family's oven, all in privatized military housing at Fort Benning and Fort Stewart. Read it and you'd think it was written in 2022. It wasn't. That's the scandal: the Pentagon outsourced a duty of care to private landlords and never enforced the contracts meant to keep it intact.

I've spent thirty years in institutional investment management and now serve as an expert witness in fiduciary litigation. The pattern is one I recognize immediately: an institution hands a core obligation to a private operator, collects a fee for oversight it doesn't actually perform, and treats the delegation itself as if it discharged the duty. It didn't. Outsourcing a duty of care doesn't outsource the duty.

Congress created the Military Housing Privatization Initiative in 1996 to fix decrepit on-base housing without loading the capital cost onto the Pentagon's books. Private companies would own, renovate, and maintain the homes under leases running as long as fifty years, with servicemembers' READ MORE AT SOURCE »