MAJOR Changes to GHC Rollout

Tuesday marked a turning point in the GHC saga: Andy Dawson was relieved of his duties as Director of TRANSCOM’s DP3 Management Office, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a memo demanding immediate action on the troubled GHC rollout. 

Before we dive into what this means, we want to recognize the efforts that helped bring attention to unanswered questions and educate officials about GHC rollout concerns. Our goal has always been to simply help bring more awareness to the general public, congressional leaders, and others in hopes of preventing any service disasters for military families, moving professionals, base personnel, and service branches. These developments wouldn’t have happened without individuals sharing their experiences, asking tough questions, and engaging with local officials to advocate for military families and highlight the serious economic and logistical strain of the GHC rollout. 

Now, the Department of Defense is clearly paying attention. DOD’s and TRANSCOM’s responses are a welcome step toward accountability and a sign that leadership is taking the concerns of military families and moving professionals seriously. We want to welcome Maj. Gen. Lance Curtis as he takes the helm of the DP3 Program for Peak Season, and we look forward to continuing to work with officials to ensure military families receive the highest quality moving services as they serve our country. 

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This comprehensive article by Federal News Network dives into the recent GHC shakeups and features insights from some industry voices: 

DoD orders ‘immediate’ changes to troubled PCS moving program, replaces senior official 

Federal News Network, Jared Serbu, May 21, 2025 

The Defense Department said Tuesday it was making “immediate modifications” to the implementation of its troubled household goods moving contract amid significant concerns that the military’s moving system may not have enough capacity to handle service members’ relocations as it enters its busiest time of the year.

In a memo to senior Pentagon leaders, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered more than a half dozen actions he said were meant to address “deficiencies” in the department’s transition to the $17.9 billion Global Household Goods contract (GHC), managed by HomeSafe Alliance. 

“I take my responsibilities to our service members, civilians, and their families seriously,” he wrote. “Through these measures, we will ensure we remain the most lethal fighting force in the world by ensuring that our warriors and their families receive the best PCS move available. The department owes them nothing less, and getting this right is part of restoring their trust in our military.” 

Below-market rates 

Perhaps most significantly, the memo acknowledges, for the first time, that the rates DoD has been offering moving subcontractors via HomeSafe “fail to reflect market rates.” Most of DoD’s existing moving companies have long contended those lower rates make it economically impossible for them to continue handling military moves, and many have long warned that they would precipitate a capacity crisis in the military moving system. 

As one way to address that gap, Hegseth ordered officials to begin offering service members much higher reimbursement rates if they’re willing to manage their own relocations, a practice DoD calls “personally procured moves” (PPMs). The military services will now offer them reimbursements of up to 130% the rate they would pay HomeSafe to conduct the same move. 

He also ordered U.S. Transportation Command to review the rates it pays HomeSafe under the contract and, “if appropriate,” implement economic price adjustments to raise those rates, a step TRANSCOM has already taken at least once since HomeSafe first won the contract in 2021 amid a long series of bid protests. 

Other steps Hegseth directed include the stand up of a new PCS task force — managed jointly by the under secretary for acquisition and sustainment and the under secretary for personnel and readiness — transitioning summer moves that HomeSafe can’t handle back into DoD’s legacy “tender for service” system, and reexamining the rates DoD will offer to those “tender” providers as they’re asked to take on military business they hadn’t planned on this summer. 

“The rates in the [tender] program were significantly reduced from years past to match what’s in the GHC. So now we’re left in a situation where the secretary of Defense has admitted that the compensation under GHC isn’t market rates, and so he’s taking care directly of the service member under PPM, but he still hasn’t solved the industry problem,” said Oded Carmi, the president of DN Van Lines, one of the firms that currently does significant work for DoD. “He also says develop and implement tender service rates as required to ensure vendor capacity, and you can also interpret that as saying we need to pay more money to get more capacity. But neither of those things are immediate or clear — we don’t know what it means or when it’s going to happen, so this is a mixed bag.”

TRANSCOM program official replaced 

Meanwhile, DoD this week also replaced Andy Dawson, the senior official who had been in charge of TRANSCOM’s Defense Personal Property Program (DP3), the office that manages the GHC contract and DoD’s broader household goods moving system. Taking Dawson’s place for the time being will be Maj. Gen. Lance Curtis, who is also the commander of the Army’s Surface Deployment and Distribution Command. Curtis will lead the program for the remainder of the peak moving season, a TRANSCOM spokesman said. 

As Federal News Network reported last week, DoD is entering its busy peak moving season with significant uncertainty about exactly how the thousands of military relocations that take place each summer will be accomplished. As of the beginning of 2025, TRANSCOM had intended to transition all domestic moves to the GHC contract by May, but there are strong indications that HomeSafe has not been able to secure near enough capacity to handle the workload. HomeSafe did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday evening. 

TRANSCOM declined to provide specific figures to reflect how many moves are currently being handled under GHC and how many remain in the tender system. But through April, only about 25% of domestic moves had been assigned to GHC, and 1,600 of those were “turned back” to the legacy system because of limitations in HomeSafe’s subcontract supplier base. According to numerous industry officials, another nearly 6,000 moves scheduled for the upcoming summer have also been “turned back” from GHC and re-ordered under the tender system. 

And the Army has already decided to — at least temporarily — stop using the GHC contract for summer moves. In an April 1 memo, the service told all of its base-level shipping offices to stop booking new moves under the contract “until further notice,” and to be prepared to process turn-backs of planned GHC moves. 

However, even with the changes Hegseth directed Tuesday, it remains to be seen whether DoD’s existing moving companies can rebuild enough capacity to handle the moving volume they’re now being asked to take on. Many of the firms that had historically specialized in military moves backed off their usual surge in summer hiring because they had been told repeatedly and consistently that DoD intended to fully implement the new lower-rate contract this summer, despite GHC’s longstanding and ongoing problems. 

Despite that uncertainty, movers “applaud the secretary’s leadership on this critical issue,” said Dan Hilton, the executive director of the American Trucking Association’s Moving and Storage Council. 

“As we have said from the beginning, the tender of service program worked in the past and continues to work well for service members, despite the challenging environment now created by the failures of the GHC contractor. We’ve continually seen shipments moved from the GHC contractor back into the tender program with minimal notice, reduced compensation, and

already impacted service members,” he said. “It’s imperative that TRANSCOM better engage members of the industry with actual capacity to find solutions that best meet our service members’ needs. We look forward to mitigating any further decline in service provided to our nation’s valiant service members and working with the Secretary’s team to help right this ship on behalf of our men and women in uniform.” 

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