The United States Coast Guard is pleased with Obama’s 2017 budget request, which provides initial funding for the acquisition of a new heavy icebreaker.

Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, Admiral Paul Zukunft opened the State of the United States Coast Guard address on Tuesday last week by thanking Congress and the Administration for the recent budget proposal. “The President’s budget for 2017 paves the way to recapitalize our Nation’s diminishing fleet of heavy icebreakers,” he said in his speech.

Largest acquisition budgets in history?

During the address, Adm. Zukunft said that the Coast Guard’s 2017 acquisition budget request is the largest in history.
Over the past 3 years the Coast Guard has faced a decreasing budget, which has made it nearly impossible to start a high cost icebreaker project.
While the Coast Guard has testified that acquisition programs would require an Acquisition, Construction, and Improvements (AC&I) account of roughly $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion, the budget submissions in 2014-2016 have been reduced to $1 billion to $1.2 billion per year.

The FY2017 acquisition budget request was $1.14 billion, which is higher than the FY2014-FY2016 budgets, but is significantly lower than the budgets requests before this timeframe, and lower than the Coast Guard’s estimates for required funding. Thus, the 2017 request continues the general trend of lower AC&I funding that began in 2013.

$150 million to fast-track construction

The FY2017 budget provides $150 million to accelerate the acquisition of a new Polar icebreaker to begin production activities by 2020.
This is a sharp increase from previous years. According to Ronald O’Rourke, a Specialist in Naval Affairs at the Congressional Research Service (CRS), funding has increased from a projection of $10 million under the 2016 submission to an actual request of $150 million in the 2017 request. This is a sharp contrast to the decrease in icebreaker funding over the last few years.

As table 1 shows, the FY13 submission was $8 million, FY14 was $2 million, FY15 was $6 million and FY16 was $4 million: