House members expressed concern about the stability of the Coast Guard budget, as well as the cuts to the Maritime Security Program and PL-480.
Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chairman of the U.S. House of Representative’s Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, said he has “ongoing concerns with the Coast Guard being an armed service within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).”
Hunter said Wednesday at a budget hearing for maritime agencies that the Coast Guard is the only armed service subjected to non-defense discretionary budget requirements, and this places the Coast Guard in competition with all non-military discretionary spending, despite the Coast Guard being a military service.
“I have ongoing concerns with the Coast Guard being an armed service within the Department of Homeland Security,” Hunter said. “On its face, the Coast Guard should fit comfortably within the Department due to its role in defense and homeland security. However, under the Department, the Coast Guard doesn’t fare well. The Service is hampered by lackluster funding requests that don’t meet the needs of the Service.”
He added that DHS “restricts what performance measures the Coast Guard publicly reports.”
“The lack of budget clarity that the non-defense discretionary budget has imposed on the Coast Guard has definitely impacted the Service in its ability to adequately and consistently fund its programs,” said Hunter at the hearing, which also included discussions on the budgets of the Maritime Administration and Federal Maritime Commission (FMC).v c
Hunter’s office did not immediately respond to a query as to whether he has proposed making the Coast Guard part of the Department of Defense or somehow shielding it in some way from being subject to non-defense discretionary budget requirements.
According to the subcommittee, President Trump’s 2019 budget for fiscal year 2019 requests $11.65 billion for the Coast Guard, 10.9 percent more than in FY 2017.
“It’s a welcome change to be able to talk about a funding increase rather than try to figure out what do with less money,” said ranking member John Garamendi, D-Calif., but he expressed concern about funding in future years.
Garamendi suggested that a better way to stop drugs from entering the country would be to take money that President Trump wants to spend building a wall along the Mexican border and use it for additional funding for the Coast Guard.
Admiral Paul F. Zukunft, the Commandant of the Coast Guard, told the committee, “Working with interagency partners, the Coast Guard seized 223 metric tons of cocaine and detained and transferred 606 smugglers for criminal prosecution in FY 2017.”
The president’s 2019 budget includes $696.4 million for the Maritime Administration, 33 percent more than in 2017.
However, the budget would include only $214 million or $3.6 million for each of the 60 ships enrolled in Marad’s Maritime Security Program. That’s a sharp drop from the $300 million or $5 million per ship in the 2017 budget, and $298 million in the annualized continuing resolution for 2018.
The Marine Engineers Beneficial Association has called that level of funding “disconcerting.”
Hunter said, “We are going to work that. I’m sure we are going to find the money in the Armed Services Committee.”
Garamendi also complained about a lack of funding for the PL-480 “Food for Peace” program, which reserves carriage of foreign aid cargo for U.S.-flag ships.
The budget also includes $300 million to fund the procurement and conversion of two used ships to replace older training ships at two of the six state maritime academies – the State University of New York (SUNY) Maritime College and the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Both of those ships are more than 50 years old.
Garamendi complained the Trump administration is planning to buy “laid up, used rusty foreign-built hulls” on which to build training ships for the state maritime academies.
Instead, he said the country should move forward to build new ships using the design for the National Security Multi-Mission Vessel (NSMV), a vessel for which Congress has provided funding for design work for two years.
Those ships could be used as both training vessels and to support government response to humanitarian and disaster crises such as Hurricanes and earthquakes.
Mark Buzby, the Maritime Administrator, said the design of the NSMV is not yet completed.
He said the request to buy used ships is “because of the time frame,” since the current training ships are so old and there is a need to replace them. SUNY’s TS Empire State was built in 1962, while Mass Maritime’s TS Kennedy was built in 1967.
Buzby said Marad plans to “cast a wide net to see what is available” and might acquire ships that are not laid up and even registered in the U.S. He estimated the cost of buying a hull and converting it into a training ship at $200 million.
He said “the business case is still there” to build the NSMV, which he said would cost about $302 million for a single ship. If two or three were built, Buzby said the cost would drop to $280 million to $290 million each.
“If the money were to materialize… we could build a new ship,” he added.
Building a new ship, he told Garamendi, “would be the very best way to go forward..if we could all afford it.”
Rep. Alan Lowenthal, D-Calif., expressed concern that there was no funding for the Title XI program in Marad’s budget, which is used to guarantee loans for shipbuilding in U.S. shipyards.
“We believe it is an important program,” said Busby.” This really comes down to a funding issue in a very difficult budget year.”
Concerns raised about Coast Guard, MarAd budgets
