Biden Administration Snubs Coast Guard In Emergency Funding Request

For the second time in two years, the Biden Administration has effectively snubbed the U.S. Coast Guard, shutting the under-funded and overtasked maritime law enforcement agency out of a wide-ranging supplemental funding instrument.

Last week, the Office of Management and Budget put forward an enormous, $50 billion dollar emergency supplemental funding request, asking Congress to boost U.S. security efforts in Ukraine as well as the Middle East, the Pacific and at the border—all places where the U.S. Coast Guard is hard at work.

But the Coast Guard, operating from a modest $13 billion budget, got nothing. America’s second Navy was ignored.

Other agencies got far better treatment. If the emergency supplemental stands, competing agency-level components of the Department of Homeland Security—the Coast Guard’s partner agencies— will get giant funding plus-ups. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is set to receive an extra $5.3 billion, a giant 27% bump over the organization’s 19.5 billion 2024 budget request. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement may get $2.5 billion, 28.7% more than the Administration’s original 8.7 billion 2024 budget proposal.

It is an embarrassment for the Coast Guard. In total, the Office of Management and Budget is seeking $13.6 billion for a “Border Supplemental Request”, and yet, the Coast Guard was left entirely out.

Emergency funding requests are capricious things, often benefiting those agencies that are wired into the bureaucracy and have large, easy-to-understand wish lists. But, after getting left behind in late 2021, when the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act granted U.S. Customs and Border Protection a massive $3.7 billion windfall in the face of the Coast Guard’s measly $434 million add-on, the Coast Guard needs to start figuring out if they have an advocacy problem—or if somebody in Biden’s Administration or the OMB staff hates the chronically-underfunded maritime-oriented organization.

DC budget battles are not the Coast Guard’s natural environment. But the Federal budget process is a zero-sum game, and everybody knows that the always-helpful and always collaborative Coast Guard struggles to engage in internecine knife fights over money. But the Coast Guard—doing all it can to secure the border, the Pacific and the Middle East—also needs to learn how to fight for their fair share of the taxpayer dollar. It’s all part of the job.

Terrible Timing For A Snub

As the Chinese Coast Guard made headlines for hitting a Philippine vessel and blockading a Philippine outpost in the South China Sea, the U.S. Coast Guard, with little fanfare, was quietly chalking up another “first” in the Pacific, completing a low-profile, four-day visit to the Philippine port of Tacloban.

Rather than celebrate with an international and multi-agency public relations effort, the U.S. Coast Guard’s audacious diplomatic coup barely rated a mention on the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. That was no mistake. It’s Bureaucracy 101: When robbing Coast Guard funding, it is poor form to point out how much the Coast Guard does with so little.

But both the State Department and the Defense Department might do well to advocate a bit more for America’s maritime law enforcement agency. The Coast Guard is fighting on all fronts and doing great work in supporting both agencies.

In the Pacific, over the past month, Coast Guard diplomats signed a bilateral law enforcement agreement with the Republic of Palau. Families welcomed the National Security Cutter USCGC Munro (WMSL 755) home from a 118-day, 23,000 mile Western Pacific patrol. The cutter did a lot while on patrol. It drew diplomatic protests from Beijing after passing through the Taiwan Straits and built more Chinese ire as the ship visited five strategic partners and worked with two more.

America’s little law enforcement navy is becoming the diplomatic “partner of choice” in the Pacific.

The Coast Guard’s efforts are paying off. In the eastern Pacific, Coast Guard assets supported Southern Shield, conducting their first high-seas boardings of fishing vessels off the coast of Peru, employing an under-appreciated victory in maritime diplomacy to push back on China’s globe-spanning and predatory illegal fishing fleet.

In the Middle East, the Coast Guard is also on the front lines, securing Americas critical petrochemical trade routes. With new Fast Response Cutters, the Coast Guard is stopping smugglers, engaging in the dangerous business of exploring how the Iranian-linked Hezbollah terror group might be raising money via drug smuggling operations. In May, USCGC Glen Harris (WPC 1144), one of 6 forward-deployed U.S. Coast Guard cutters operating in the Persian Gulf—almost 10 percent of the Coast Guard’s planned Sentinel-class cutter fleet—intercepted Iranian smugglers, seizing $110 million in heroin and methamphetamine in a single week.

On America’s maritime borders, migrants are also stressing the Coast Guard. In FY 2022 alone, the known flow of seaborne migrants increased by 44%. Migrants are choosing the maritime in increasing numbers, with maritime migrant interceptions more than doubling. In April, halfway through the fiscal year, the Coast Guard had already intercepted some 6,202 Cubans in contrast to interdicting 6,182 Cubans over the twelve months of the previous fiscal year. Migration from Haiti and the Dominican Republic is increasing by similar levels, but the Coast Guard rarely discusses the substantial operational challenges posed by the ongoing uptick in maritime migrants.

Put bluntly, the Coast Guard is doing an awful lot for very little. Despite hiccups, the Coast Guard desperately needs funding. The Coast Guard can certainly use extra operational and maintenance money, stations need refurbishing across the service, and sailors desperately need small-cutter tenders support forward engagement and to prepare for a wave of high-risk anti-smuggling, sea control and migrant interdiction operations from the Persian Gulf to the Caribbean and beyond.

The sad thing is that it doesn’t take much to make the Coast Guard happy, and, by now, both Congress and the Administration should know that the Coast Guard can do far more for the country with $434 million than U.S. Customs and Border Protection will ever do with $3.7 billion.

With a little bit of cash, America’s maritime law enforcement agency can make miracles happen, pulling lost and hapless mariners from almost certain death at sea. But it cannot make something out of nothing. And nothing is exactly what the Coast Guard is getting from the Administration’s supplemental emergency funding request.