A Coast Guard C-130 Hercules prepares to transport migrants in San Diego, Calif., on Feb. 2, 2025. (U.S. Coast Guard)
WASHINGTON — The Coast Guard needs more money and long-term investments in new ships and aircraft to keep up with the Trump administration’s crack down on illegal crossings and drug trafficking along the southern border, the acting commandant of the Coast Guard told House lawmakers on Wednesday.
“We are continually hampered by pressure for sustaining and operating our assets — our boats and our ships. We are not able to maintain them at the rate we need to,” Adm. Kevin Lunday said as he testified before the homeland security subpanel of the House Appropriations Committee.
Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, homeland security and military forces have been surged to the southern border to fend off what Trump has described as an “invasion.” This has included deploying two Navy destroyers and about 9,600 service members to the federal border security mission.
Lunday, who previously served as the vice commandant, took command of the Coast Guard on Jan. 21 after Trump fired Adm. Linda Fagan from the position reportedly for failing to address border security. After Fagan was replaced by Lunday, Coast Guard ships were immediately surged to southern Florida and other areas of the country to deter maritime migration. Since then, Lunday said the Coast Guard has stopped more than 860 migrants between the U.S. and Mexico in the Pacific Ocean and Gulf of America. The service has also conducted 157 deportation flights to date.
“Despite the mission success and great work of our people, the Coast Guard is in a severe readiness crisis that has been decades in the making. Today, our Coast Guard is less ready than at any other time since the end of World War II — 80 years ago. This is not sustainable,” Lunday said.
While the service’s budget for fiscal 2026 has yet to be released, the Coast Guard typically has an annual budget of about $13.8 billion. Of that, about $2 billion historically has been allocated for purchasing new ships and aircraft.
The Coast Guard has about 56,000 active-duty and auxiliary personnel who operate 259 cutters, 143 helicopters, 57 fixed-wing aircraft, and more than 1,600 smaller boats and launches, according to the service website.
Coast Guard helicopters are often refurbished helicopters from the Navy. While the Navy grounds helicopters after 12,000 flight hours, the Coast Guard runs them for up to 19,000 hours.
“Even though we can operate aircraft to that level, we should not be. We should be investing in new aircraft,” Lunday said.
Adm. Kevin Lunday is the acting commandant of the Coast Guard. (U.S. Coast Guard)
Many of the Coast Guard’s cutters — ships that are 65 feet or longer — are approaching 50 years old. Additionally, the service operates only two aging icebreakers — the 27-year-old medium icebreaker USCGC Healy and the 49-year-old heavy icebreaker USCGC Polar Star. The Coast Guard’s other heavy icebreaker, the Polar Sea, has been out of service since 2010 due to engine failure. By contrast, Russia operates a fleet of 55 icebreakers and China has four.
Rep. Lauren Underwood of Illinois, the top Democrat on the subcommittee, said she supports large increases to the Coast Guard’s budget.
“But I am concerned that this administration’s political goals are shifting those limited resources away from strategic theaters where bad actors are aggressively testing American resolve,” Underwood said as she asked how the Coast Guard’s involvement in the U.S.-Mexico border mission was impacting its other responsibilities.
The expanding worldwide role of the Coast Guard includes helping challenge China, patrol the Arctic region, lead anti-terrorist port safety, and train partner countries in drug and illegal shipping interdiction. These efforts are all in addition to maintaining its traditional roles of water emergency rescues, inspecting ship safety, and enforcing environmental regulations on waterways.
Two scheduled operational deployments — a patrol in the Pacific and a port visit in Iceland — were temporarily changed to support the U.S.-Mexico border mission, according to Lunday. The Coast Guard continues to maintain a presence in the Indo-Pacific and Arctic regions, he said. Sliding the deployments, Lunday said, is not unprecedented as he pointed back to a lack of resources.
“We make those tough tradeoffs all the time because there is an increasing demand for Coast Guard resources, and always a limited number of cutters, boats, aircraft crews to provide them,” he said.
Lunday’s testimony Wednesday echoed that of Vice Adm. Andrew Tiongson, commander of the Coast Guard’s Pacific area, who spoke April 7 during a panel at the Sea Air Space Symposium in Washington. Tiongson used the symposium to advocate for the Coast Guard to increase its budget.
The Coast Guard’s Pacific area of responsibility stretches from the West Coast of the U.S. to Asia and from the Arctic to Antarctica. It encompasses six of the seven continents, more than 70 countries, and approximately 74 million square miles of ocean.
The Coast Guard needs the other services to help fill in gaps at sea, according to Tiongson. The Navy deployed two destroyers — one off the coast of California and Mexico and one in the Gulf of America — to help combat maritime migration, a mission traditionally conducted by Coast Guard ships. Additionally, Navy and Air Force reconnaissance planes have been tasked with surveilling the region as the U.S. ramps up efforts to deter illegal immigration.
“We are pros at stretching as best we can ... Perhaps it’s time to do not more with less, but less with less,” Tiongson said. “We don’t want to be there. We want to go ahead and continue to provide a safe, secure and prosperous America. But we need some help.”
Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., chairman of the subcommittee, urged Lunday to communicate with lawmakers while he serves as the acting commandant of the Coast Guard.
“In my view, the Coast Guard has chronically under-asked for resources,” Amodei said. “I need you to tell me what you need.”
