Senator Grills Allen on Coast Guard Budget
By philip ewing
Published: 6 Mar 16:00 EST (11:00 GMT) Print | Email

U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen went to Capitol Hill on March 6 to make his case for Congress to fully fund his $9.3 billion fiscal 2009 budget request. But the tales of worn-out ships and overworked Coast Guardsmen that Allen has used elsewhere seemed to earn him little sympathy from Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., chairwoman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation subcommittee on oceans, atmosphere, fisheries and Coast Guard, who asked pointed questions about the lifesaving service’s $24 billion recapitalization portfolio, Deepwater.

In a wide-ranging session, Cantwell said she was worried about the potential for structural problems aboard the first national security cutter, the Bertholf; about the ship’s command and communications suite; that the Coast Guard might not be able to get a refund from its contractors if the cutter were to have endemic problems; about the Coast Guard’s capacity to operate in the Arctic; and that the Coast Guard was spending too much on its new HC-144A Ocean Sentry maritime patrol aircraft.

Related TopicsAmericas
Naval Warfare
“Given all the problems with Deepwater, given all the problems we still would tend to think we haven’t seen yet … we want to make sure that all the assets the Coast Guard is seeking have a proper amount of oversight and attention so we don’t run into the same problems with these assets as with the national security cutters,” Cantwell said of the Ocean Sentry and the other new Deepwater vessels and aircraft.

In each case, Allen acknowledged Cantwell’s concerns or explained that he thought Coast Guardsmen had taken the best measures to resolve the problems. He reiterated his enthusiasm for the Bertholf as a highly capable new ship, explained that the Ocean Sentry had played a crucial role recently in rescuing an Air Force pilot after two F-15s collided over the Gulf of Mexico and said generally that he thought the Coast Guard had turned a corner in managing Deepwater.

Stephen Caldwell, director of homeland security and justice investigations for the Government Accountability Office, said he mostly agreed that the Coast Guard was doing better in managing its acquisitions. He appeared with Allen and released a new GAO report on the fiscal 2009 Coast Guard budget at the subcommittee hearing.

During the hearing, Cantwell referred often to the Coast Guard “Alternatives Analysis” report, ordered last year after the previous wave of Deepwater criticism and finished in February, which suggests that if the Coast Guard picks a good design for its new Offshore Patrol Cutter, it might need two fewer National Security Cutters, which could cut costs. Cantwell told Allen she wanted his assurance that the Coast Guard would control the costs of the OPC project and make sure it retained the option to get money back from contractors if they made mistakes while building the ship.

The reason, she said, was that she worried about the Bertholf’s structural ability to ride in rough seas after earlier reports that the ship might be prone to stress problems or cracking. She told Allen she didn’t want the Coast Guard to go forward with what it knew was a “flawed design.”

Allen said he didn’t think the design was flawed, and he assured Cantwell that the design modifications to the Bertholf and the second NSC, the Waesche, were accounted for when the Coast Guard awarded the contract for the third ship, the Hamilton. Still, Cantwell said she was concerned that officials were “deferring a flawed design to a later year.”

Cantwell raised other points, including a worry that the Coast Guard wouldn’t be able to cope with a longer shipping season in the melting Arctic, that the Coast Guard wouldn’t be able to respond to an environmental event on the order of the Cosco Busan oil spill this fall in San Francisco Bay, and that the Ocean Sentry was too expensive and the “Alternatives Analysis” hadn’t mentioned other possible aircraft to do its job. Cantwell’s home state of Washington includes many plants belonging to aerospace giant Boeing.

“All these assets are going to continue to get the attention of this committee. We are seeing … various questions raised. We can’t afford to make any more mistakes. All the assets deserve a complete scrubbing to make sure we are acquiring the right assets,” she said.

Notwithstanding Cantwell’s questioning, when Allen spoke with reporters during a break in the hearing, he said he thought Congress would fully fund his budget request

“I need every dollar,” he said.