The Pentagon’s newest push to trim its workforce and spending could mean that on-base grocery stores and shops designed to save service members and their families money could ultimately be sold off to the private sector.

An April 7 memo signed by Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg listed a wide range of possible reforms aimed at “delivering maximum value to the warfighter.” Among them included “all functions that are not inherently governmental (e.g. retail sales and recreation) should be prioritized for privatization.”

A defense official familiar with the intent behind the memo told Military.com on Thursday that there weren’t any off-limit areas for cuts or privatization. Commissaries, military-run hotels, and on-base welfare facilities were all fair game, they said.

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However, the official noted that it was up to the individual military services to bring forward suggestions and that just because something like a commissary is put forward for privatization doesn’t automatically mean that it will be sold off.

“Everything is pre-decisional right now,” the official said.

Privatizing aspects of the military’s support services has a long and largely problematic history that has resulted in markedly poorer outcomes for service members while offering little in the way of savings for the Pentagon.

William “Bill” Moore, who served as the director and CEO of the Defense Commissary Agency, or DeCA, between 2020 and 2024, wrote in an opinion piece for the Ripon Society think tank last year that “privatizing commissaries is, quite simply, a bad idea.”

Moore explained to Military.com in an interview Friday that funding from Congress helps subsidize the commissaries, allowing them to offer products much more affordably than other grocery stores.

“If you privatize without subsidy, I guarantee you, there is no way they will be able to save military families anything,” Moore said. “I would be shocked if any for-profit company could take over the commissaries and deliver any benefit to military families beyond convenience. There’s no way they could sell items at the prices the commissary could.”

Commissaries have taken scrutiny in recent years. A 2022 Government Accountability office report critiqued the methodology for how the agency calculated some of its customer savings rates, describing it as “unreliable.”

Moore told Military.com that they “fixed a lot of that” and were still working on improving those savings estimates up to his departure from DeCA.

While commissaries are nonprofit organizations by law, profits from military exchanges — retail stores on military bases that sell a wide variety of products — also get cycled into the Morale, Welfare and Recreation programs for service members and their families.

It was unclear how those recreation programs would be fully funded if exchanges were turned over to private companies, which would likely choose to pocket those profits.

Notably, some of the top leaders in the Trump administration have voiced their support for privatization efforts in the past.

Former Rep. Mike Waltz, now Trump’s national security adviser, said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing last year that he wanted the military “out of the hotel management business” and said the private sector could do the job “incredibly well” when it came to base housing.

As cautionary tales of privatization go, the military’s handover of family housing is a prime example. For decades, the arrangement has caused a raft of problems involving companies that manage the units where troops and their families live.

Balfour Beatty, a massive company that manages more than 40,000 military homes across more than 50 bases, has repeatedly been sued and forced to pay restitution to military families for its consistent failure to ensure military homes in its care are safe and livable.

Two weeks ago, the company was hit with yet another lawsuit that alleged the company “concealed the horrific conditions from unsuspecting service men and women and their families” and then, “when these conditions were discovered and reported, Balfour systematically failed to properly repair and remediate significant problems.”

However, the company’s history of shoddy work goes back decades.

In 2019, Balfour Beatty was caught up in a nationwide scandal over squalid family housing and pleaded guilty in 2021 to falsifying maintenance records that went as far back as 2013. The company was ordered to pay $65.4 million in fines and restitution for misconduct related to its military housing practices in federal contracts.

And yet, despite that scandal and fine, in 2022, an eight-month investigation by a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs panel found the company was continuing to ignore residents’ concerns over mold, asbestos and other problems in their homes.

Balfour Beatty is not alone, though.

In 2020, families of Marines stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, took several private companies that run housing on that base to court over their alleged failure to provide safe residences or respond to complaints of mold, mildew, water intrusion, roaches and maintenance problems.

That same year, nine Army families also sued their privatized base housing landlords at Fort Cavazos, Texas, over allegations of life-threatening levels of mold and “deplorable” conditions in their homes that ruined their belongings.

An Army family at the base was awarded $10.3 million in 2024 after they were forced to live in a mold-infested home run by a private Army housing company, leading to repeated hospitalizations of their newborn infant for respiratory difficulties.

Those issues have not stopped the military from trying to create new privatized housing solutions for troops. In September, Edwards Air Force Base, California, broke ground on the service’s first privatized on-base apartment complex.

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