DoD set to start ramping up new military moving contract

The Defense Department is ready to start ramping up implementation of its long-planned overhaul of the military’s household goods moving system, including by conducting DoD’s first-ever long distance moves under the new contract structure, U.S. Transportation Command officials said Tuesday.

The expansion of work under the up-to-$17.9 billion Global Household Goods contract (GHC), set for September, will mark DoD’s first attempt to use GHC beyond the short-distance, local moves it has been using to test the new program since April. The first four long-distance routes involve large Navy population centers: they’ll run between Norfolk, Va., and the Seattle, Jacksonville and San Diego metro areas, plus another between San Diego and Seattle.

In addition, GHC and its prime contractor, HomeSafe Alliance, will add more short-distance moves from 16 additional bases next month. Those bases are located in nine states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia.

GHC volume still small, but growing

In terms of total volume, the GHC program will remain relatively small in the near term: it will move only about 4% of DoD’s total household goods shipments in September. But officials said they would gradually add more moves to the program each month, and that for shipments within the continental U.S., they expect it to fully replace the current Defense Personal Property Program (DP3) by next spring.

“The positive feedback received from both customers and our transportation offices shows that we are headed in the right direction,” Andy Dawson, the director of TRANSCOM’s Defense Personal Property Management Office said in a statement. “This summer provided us the opportunity to validate new business processes and IT systems for GHC on a smaller scale while customers experience the new program. Overall, we are satisfied with how things have gone so far and anticipate continued progress as GHC volume increases this fall.”

Overseas moves will take longer to implement. Officials said they do not expect international moves to begin transitioning to GHC until September 2025.

TRANSCOM officials emphasized that DoD’s phase-in plans for domestic moves were subject to change, depending on how the program continues to unfold. But the goal of fully implementing the program for domestic moves by next spring appears ambitious, considering the scale of the program so far.

Challenges and industry concerns

Between April and this week, only 100 moves have been conducted under GHC, all of them local, as TRANSCOM and HomeSafe work to prove out the program, and only 16 moving companies have conducted work under GHC so far. A HomeSafe spokeswoman declined to disclose the total number of companies that have committed to work under the program, saying that figure would not be a good indicator of the total moving capacity in the new system.

However, DoD and HomeSafe have had little success in convincing moving companies that conduct moves under the current DP3 system to take part in GHC. Those firms say the rates being offered are so low that in many cases, they would lose money, and that labor and payment rules in the new system are incompatible with how the moving industry does business, particularly for interstate moves.

Earlier this summer, a coalition of those companies, called Movers for America, succeeded in persuading members of the House to add language to its version of the 2025 Defense authorization bill that would mandate a Government Accountability Office review of the new contract.

“TRANSCOM seems committed to throwing out a system that works, that’s continually improving, and that supports American competitiveness in favor of a monopolistic, untested new system with no backup plan,” Jack Griffin, the chairman and CEO of Atlas World Group, wrote in an op-ed last week. “I call on our Congressional leaders to give this high-stakes experiment the careful scrutiny it demands, and insist on a strategic pause of GHC implementation so a comprehensive evaluation of its feasibility can be conducted by GAO.”

Dawson said TRANSCOM would give moving companies a more detailed update on the GHC transition during an industry forum on Sept. 18.

“Industry partners who provide quality moving services have an opportunity to continue to work with DoD under GHC,” he said. “We welcome industry’s participation as we execute this historic transformation to improve the moving experience for our service members and their families. The GHC concept has been in the works for many years, and we are thrilled to finally begin offering it to our service members and their families. We hope they are excited to use all the new features and tools and are pleased with a much smoother, modern, and overall improved experience offered by GHC.”

The GHC contract is a dramatic departure from the way DoD currently procures household goods moves. Instead of hiring moving companies one-by-one for each household’s PCS shipment, the goal has long been to consolidate the government’s contracting relationship down to just one centralized service provider, who then subcontracts with individual moving companies.

After a protracted, multi-year series of bid protests, HomeSafe, a joint venture between KBR and Tier One Relocation, finally got the go-ahead to start performing work under the contract in late 2022. The implementation was later delayed even further by IT integration problems.

In a conference call last month, Stuart Bradie, KBR’s chairman and CEO told investors that HomeSafe’s subcontractor base of movers appears to be lined up well for what the company will need to deliver “for the next little while,” but expressed at least some caution about the notion that the company will be ready to handle all domestic moves by next year’s summer peak season.

“We’re testing the systems right now with a view that we’ll be doing full domestic moves in the busy season of 2025, but obviously the targets that we gave in our recent investor day are a bit more conservative than that, and rightfully so,” he said. “It’s a new program, but we’re doing all we can to achieve that and line up behind that expectation.”

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