Soon after becoming President Donald Trump's Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth warned that the American military risked a late Soviet-style decline. Speaking before a group of defense executives in November 2025, he teased comparisons with the USSR and even the Chinese Communist Party as he described an "adversary" that poses a serious threat to the United States of America.

"The adversary I'm talking about is much closer to home," he said. "It's the Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the process."

This March, the world's largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, pulled into port at Souda Bay, Greece, scheduled for more than a week of repairs. More than 200 of its sailors were receiving treatment for smoke inhalation after a laundry room fire spread through the ventilation system into the carrier's sleeping quarters.

The ship had been at sea for 10 months — long past its deployment length — and was reportedly dealing with electrical problems and delayed maintenance that led to overworked equipment. That came on top of sewage problems on the ship that left its crew unable to use its toilets.

According to Linda Bilmes, a Harvard Kennedy School public policy lecturer and author of The Ghost Budget: U.S. War Spending and Fiscal Transparency, the USS Gerald R. Ford represents a larger problem for the U.S. military: a massive tract of infrastructure and facilities without the proper structures to maintain them.

"Here you have $13 billion spent on the highest tech carrier in the entire navy, and somehow there wasn't a sufficient amount of money spent on maintaining the laundry conditions and the toilets," Bilmes told Fortune. "That's just one example, but you have to question whether the resources are being allocated in a way that provides maximum benefits."

A report published last week by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the federal government's audit institution, quantified the scale of the problem. Across the Department of Defense's real estate portfolio of more than 700,000 facilities around the world — some of which are at least 50 years old or date back to the Cold War — the department is dealing with a $285 billion maintenance backlog in fiscal 2025 as a result of insufficient funding and personnel. It was the latest in a series of GAO reviews documenting the condition of the department's aging facilities.

The findings included "chronically neglected" maintenance of some barracks that adversely affected the quality of life of enlisted service members, posing safety risks due to mold and broken fire systems. The report also noted crumbling parking lots at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, which have been in disrepair since at least 2018, as well as narrow quarters at the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in California, which could not accommodate the maintenance of Marine Corps vehicles.

"This poses a risk to its missions and the quality of life of its personnel," the report said.

The Pentagon did not respond to Fortune's request for comment.

How the U.S. diverges from the Soviet military downfall

This is not a matter of just one administration mismanaging money. The Pentagon is the only major federal agency that has never passed an audit — it has come up short in every department-wide financial audit it has undergone since they began in fiscal 2018. While the department attributes the opacity around the procurement and distribution of its massive $1 trillion budget to the sheer size of the agency and its responsibilities, the GAO has instead found evidence of pervasive money mismanagement. For example, the Navy lost track of $3 billion in equipment over the last three years, and at one Naval distribution center a backlog of 122,000 items had not been processed — with the result that the Navy bought equipment and supplies it didn't need.

Hegseth's implied Soviet comparison recalls the rigid structures that prioritized quantity over quality, leading the former superpower to spend up to 15% to 30% of its GDP on military industry, starving its economy and contributing to its downfall. He called for defense acquisition reform, as well as systems to streamline contracting.

But U.S. defense spending differs from the USSR's in a key respect: the United States spends just about 3% of its GDP on defense. While the Soviet Union saw its military collapse because it became a poor country that ran out of resources, the U.S. military's exorbitant maintenance burden is instead the result of a wealthy country continuing to misallocate funds as its budget swells.

Policy experts like Bilmes suggest this trend is not just a perennial problem, but one unlikely to reverse anytime soon.

"The question really is whether the whole system is serving the best interest of taxpayers, and I don't think it is," Bilmes said. "And that's a larger problem and an older problem than just the last two years of the Trump administration."

How U.S. military maintenance fell by the wayside

The GAO attributes the backlog of maintenance projects in large part to maintenance being underprioritized and therefore underfunded. The Department of Defense did not request the full funding necessary for its maintenance needs: the Army, Navy, and Air Force requested just about 80% of recommended sustainment funding, according to the report. None of the eight installation maintenance offices the GAO spoke with said they had received funding that met the agency's 90% goal since at least fiscal 2021.

Part of this funding gap comes from the allure of building new facilities versus servicing old ones. Last year, the GAO reported that the Pentagon invested $14.6 billion annually on average in the previous five years to build new military facilities. That came despite military service officials saying many facility construction and repair projects were approved by the service review board but simply did not get funded.

Even with proper funding, the project of maintaining military facilities would have been jeopardized by shortages in personnel needed to carry out repairs. All 10 Department of Defense joint bases that the GAO had data access to had shortages of facility management workforce between 68% to 97% of approved positions from fiscal 2013 to fiscal 2023.

The military has had trouble recruiting and retaining federal blue-collar workers who are specialists and required to conduct their work in remote environments around the world. To fill these shortages, the military often turns to contractors, whom it pays a premium.

"It is very, very heavily reliant on the private sector, which is reliant on its own supply chain and so forth," Bilmes said. "And if you want something fixed really fast, the military has to pay extra."

Bilmes likened the difficulty of carrying out repairs on military facilities to having a broken washing machine, but on a far vaster scale: you have to call a specialized repairperson, who diagnoses the issue, orders a part and waits for it to arrive before installing it — and that is only if the washing machine is worth keeping rather than scrapping altogether.

These are challenges the military contends with in peacetime, Bilmes said, and they are made worse in times of conflict. NBC News reported on Tuesday that Iranian missile and drone attacks caused billions of dollars in needed repairs for damage to U.S. intelligence posts and surveillance hardware in the region. A Washington Post investigation in May revealed damage to at least 228 structures or equipment pieces across 15 military sites as a result of the war.

"This is a problem which has just been growing, but is significantly going to be exacerbated by the last six months," Bilmes said. She estimated the repair costs would exceed $200 billion and take between three to five years to fix.

There is evidence to suggest the Trump administration's priorities may be coming at the cost of future maintenance projects. In July, the GAO released a report finding that President Donald Trump's increased military presence at the U.S.-Mexico border cost the military $2.64 billion, with that money being pulled from construction projects, facility maintenance, and accounts that support duty-station moves.

The larger issue with U.S. defense spending

The neglect of U.S. military facilities highlights, to Bilmes, an issue the Pentagon — and the U.S. more broadly — has been grappling with since 2001, when the military budget began to balloon and eventually nearly tripled over the next 25 years.

Though she did not make comparisons between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, she warned that the lack of clear prioritization would not be a matter of American collapse, but would rather continue to unnecessarily endanger enlisted members serving on potentially dangerous, under-resourced bases, all the while draining taxpayer dollars.

Within the military, "everything is important," Bilmes said, but it is sometimes hard to distinguish what is an urgent matter and what is not. The laundry and sewage systems of a massive ship may seem unimportant, she suggested, but choosing to prioritize other issues, including new construction, resulted in hundreds of injuries. The lack of clarity on what is considered most important can subsequently enable a maintenance backlog.

"There has been a huge amount of money in the military — what former [Secretary of Defense Robert Gates] called the 'culture of endless money' — but there really has not been a very clear way of allocating resources."

The clearest markers of progress from here are the department's annual budget requests — whether the services seek closer to the full sustainment funding GAO says their facilities need after years of asking for roughly 80% — and how Congress, which appropriates the money, chooses to respond.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.