Washington—The American Trucking Associations’ Moving and Storage Conference commends Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for his leadership in addressing industry concerns over the implementation of the Global Household Goods Contract (GHC). In a memo to senior Pentagon leaders, Secretary Hegseth calls for “immediate modifications” and outlines several actions meant to address “deficiencies” in the department’s transition to the GHC.
This memo comes on the heels of two ATA-MSC letters sent to TRANSCOM and Congress earlier this month. For some time, the ATA-MSC has raised serious concerns that GHC implementation through TRANSCOM is proceeding without transparency or a clear strategy for the future of that implementation. This lack of transparency or strategy prevents the moving industry from making the requisite investments to secure future capacity needed under either GHC or DP3 (or both).
ATA-MSC Executive Director Dan Hilton released the following statement:
We applaud the Secretary's leadership on this critical issue. There is nothing as important as the timely, reliable, and professional moves for the men and women of our armed forces.
Members of the moving and storage industry have raised many of these issues, and we remain concerned over the disparity in compensation and apparent quality standards between the Tender of Service (ToS) program and the Global Household Goods (GHC) contract.
As we have said from the beginning, the ToS 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 ToS program with minimal notice, reduced compensation, and already impacted service members.
We remain concerned over the GHC contractor’s unpreparedness, due to lack of industry engagement in its program, to handle any meaningful volume during this peak season. It’s been the experience of our members that the traditional ToS capacity has been unable to adequately plan for peak season due to the GHC contractor’s failed implementation.
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.