The U.S. Coast Guard, which has been struggling with its new ship efforts, has reportedly placed a temporary stop work order on two cutters under construction in its Heritage-class Offshore Patrol Class. Reports of the pause come a day after the Department of Homeland Security announced it had canceled a contract for another cutter in its Legend-class national security cutter and the Department has promised to overhaul the operations of the USCG under its Force Design 2028 project.
News of the pause was reported by Defense Daily which wrote that work on the third and fourth vessels underway at Eastern Shipbuilding is being delayed as issues regarding funding and delays in the timing of the program are underway. Work on the third cutter, to be named, Ingham, has been underway since mid-2022 when the keel was laid, and steel cutting is underway for number four, USCG Rush.
We have noted already that Eastern seems to have had problem. Note, at this point, this is not a cancellation as happens with NSC#11 yesterday. But it looks like it may be a prelude to negotiations that may lead to cancellation, in that it puts these two ships into a status similar to that of NSC#11 prior to the cancellation.
Thanks to Andy for bringing this to my attention.
Chuck Hill's CG Blog 
sad to see this level of miss management throughout the United States.
The interesting thing with these is they are very much in a high degree of assembly at the yard. I have never seen NSC-11 sitting in recent HII pics.
Mismanagement or higher priorities! I suspect the suspension of the two OPC and the one NSC is to free up construction manpower to construct new US Navy ships first, to meet the 381-ship goal and deal with the CG after the goal has been met…
Looks like priorities are going to icebreakers.
https://gcaptain.com/davie-to-acquire-texas-shipyards-seeking-to-supercharge-u-s-icebreaker-production/
Essentially work on NSC#11 had been suspended for some time. Work on OPCs #3 and 4 has not made substantial progress. I have long had misgivings about Eastern. https://chuckhillscgblog.net/2025/05/17/what-is-happening-with-opcs-at-eastern/
The 12 HECs will have been replaced as soon as we have twelve NSCs and OPCs. The OPCs can do virtually anything the Hamilton class could do except go 29 knots and they did that very seldom.
There are a couple ways to proceed, either accelerate production of the OPCs including adding in a another builder, or the course I would suggest, continue building OPCs at Austal as planned, but also start a new cutter program in parallel.