Budget cut could further beach Coast Guard
President wants to trim 2.4% despite agency’s increased mission
ALAMEDA, Calif. — Vice Adm. Fred Midgette, commander of Coast Guard operations in the Pacific Area, has a challenge almost as vast as the ocean he patrols in search of drug traffickers, with responsibilities for an area that is twice the size of the continental United States.
The Coast Guard is struggling to keep pace, seizing about 20 percent of all the drugs that come into the U.S. through a coastal border, as its aging fleet attempts to pursue the speedboats favored by the traffickers.
“When most people think border security, they think Border Patrol,” Midgette said. “What we do by intercepting drugs on the high seas has a direct connection to what happens at the southern border in terms of stopping illicit drugs and illegal immigration.
“When you are stopping drugs at the Rio Grande, that’s already a loss,” he added. “You want to push that stuff off from America as far as you can.”
But that is becoming increasingly difficult for the Coast Guard, which has operated with flat budgets even as its mission has expanded to include intelligence and anti-terrorism.
There are newer ships like the Stratton, a Coast Guard cutter, but many others in the fleet are more than 50 years old. President Donald Trump’s new budget would cut Coast Guard funding by 2.4 percent. The proposed reduction in money comes as the smuggling problem has become more urgent. About 70 percent of the cocaine consumed in the U.S. passes through a corridor that runs up to the borders of Guatemala and El Salvador. Fighting among drug cartels has led to record-high homicide rates and driven thousands of people to the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum.
Founded more than 100 years ago, the Coast Guard, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, operates simultaneously as a military service, a law enforcement agency and as a member of the U.S. intelligence community.
Funding the Coast Guard at current levels — nearly $10 billion — leaves the service struggling to combat the drug trafficking that has been pushed offshore by beefed up security on the southern land border.
“We give you the biggest bang for the buck,” said Adm. Paul F. Zukunft, commandant of the Coast Guard. “But our resources are limited. As a result, we can’t catch all the drug smuggling we know about. Just last year we had intelligence on nearly 580 possible shipments but couldn’t go intercept them because we didn’t have the ships or planes to go after them.”
The 418-foot Stratton is one of the most advanced vessels in the Coast Guard fleet, equipped with advanced radar systems, infrared video, a helicopter and a small drone called the ScanEagle. Built in 2012, it is one of six national security cutters that are in service and provide a significant upgrade to the Coast Guard’s arsenal.
On a recent morning aboard the Stratton, dozens of crew members dressed in blue work uniforms scurried about making repairs. The sound of drilling echoed through the corridors of the ship. In less than four weeks, the Stratton will be headed out to sea. In the expanse of the Pacific, cutters like the Stratton target fishing boats, speedboats called pangas and homemade submarines that are used to smuggle tons of drugs from Central America through Mexico and ultimately into the U.S. Cartels in Latin America and the Caribbean have increasingly turned to trafficking on the high seas as cocaine production in South America has reached record levels.