Pentagon’s unused properties drain billions in taxpayer funds
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A new report exposes the Pentagon’s costly upkeep of unused buildings, with officials avoiding declarations of excess to preserve inflated budgets and funding.
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The Department of Defense logo is seen on the wall in the Press Briefing room at the Pentagon, Oct. 29, 2024, in Washington (AP)
The Pentagon is facing renewed criticism over its continued funding of underused and abandoned infrastructure, including golf courses and warehouses that serve no operational purpose but still absorb taxpayer dollars.
In a scathing article published by Responsible Statecraft, Nick Cleveland-Stout of the Quincy Institute exposed the systemic dysfunction behind the Department of Defense’s property management system.
“What's worse than the Pentagon spending taxpayer dollars on golf courses?” he wrote. “Spending taxpayer dollars on golf courses that nobody uses.”
With $4.1 trillion in assets and control over 26.7 million acres of land, the Department of Defense (DoD) maintains one of the largest real estate portfolios in the world. Yet, a recent Pentagon report confirms what many have long suspected: vast portions of this infrastructure, clubhouses, depots, and warehouses, are sitting idle. The Army alone lists at least six unused “Golf Club House and Sales” facilities, while the Navy acknowledges two more.
Self-reported data obscures true scale of military waste
The waste is not limited to leisure facilities. A Pentagon official, speaking anonymously to Responsible Statecraft, stated the issue of idle buildings is “out of hand,” adding that installations are hesitant to declare assets as “excess” because doing so puts their funding at risk. Instead, many facilities are listed as “active” long after they’ve ceased to serve any function.
The 2024 Pentagon infrastructure report attempts to assess the scale of excess assets, but data inconsistencies undermine its reliability. Only the Army provided full infrastructure figures alongside estimates of excess properties. The Navy and Air Force submitted incomplete data, forcing researchers to rely on cross-referenced figures from the General Services Administration (GSA) databases.
Curiously, the Air Force claimed it reduced its excess infrastructure from around 30% in 2017 to less than 0.1% in 2024, a figure that conflicts with statements by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allen, who maintains the service still operates with 30% more infrastructure than needed.
Incentives encourage concealment of unused infrastructure
The anonymous Pentagon official explained that military installations have little motivation to report facilities as unused. “Declaring a building ‘excess’ causes sustainment funding to drop by about 85%,” the source said. “So if a base is getting $250,000 a year to maintain a warehouse, it’ll keep that warehouse listed as active, even if it’s boarded up and completely unused.”
The report also notes the Army’s admission that it lacks the personnel to conduct utilization studies, and other branches either failed to submit complete data or offered outdated figures. This self-reported, unverified system of infrastructure accounting has allowed a phantom economy of idle facilities to thrive, on paper and on budget.
The last reliable snapshot of the Pentagon’s excess infrastructure comes from a 2017 report that used a 1989 baseline for comparison. That report estimated about 20% of all infrastructure was unnecessary, noting that even those findings underrepresented the problem. It cited the closure of numerous installations through the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process as proof that significant excess existed long before any formal evaluations were conducted.
BRAC rounds have saved taxpayers roughly $12 billion annually, and Cleveland-Stout argues that it’s time Congress authorizes a new round. In addition, he recommends mandatory annual or biennial reporting on excess infrastructure using a standardized methodology, free from self-reporting flaws and manipulation.
Without such reforms, Cleveland-Stout warns, the Pentagon’s vast network of unused facilities will continue to drain public funds in silence, hidden beneath layers of bureaucracy and protected by perverse incentives that reward waste and penalize honesty.
