The Douglas A. Munro Coast Guard Headquarters Building located in southeast Washington is shown from the aerial perspective of a Coast Guard MH-65 helicopter Aug. 21, 2015. A ribbon cutting ceremony was held July 29, 2013, which completed the first stage of the Department of Homeland Security consolidation project on the St. Elizabeths west campus.

US Naval Institute News Service reports,

A trio of Republican senators have introduced a bill to create Secretary of the Coast Guard and Undersecretary positions as the civilian head of the 43,000-member service, USNI News has learned.

According to the draft ‘‘Coast Guard Leadership Modernization Act’’ obtained by USNI News, the new Secretary of the Coast Guard position would report to the Secretary of Homeland Security and takeover many of the interactions the service had with the Pentagon, according to the bill text.

“…create Secretary of the Coast Guard and Undersecretary positions.” Unfortunately I do not think adding two more layers of expensive civilian bureaucracy is going to be helpful.

My observation, suggests that while the Coast Guard has bipartisan support in Congress other agencies in DHS frequently do not. Congress keeps asking what we need, but it appears the Department has held up reports Congress asked for. There has been strong pressure from GAO to keep the budget nearly constant with only small increases. The Department seems to have reacted by more strongly supporting other agencies in the Department assuming the Coast Guard would continue to be supported as it always has been. Evidence of this is the fact that almost every year Congress has added to the administrations’ Coast Guard budget requests.

The Coast Guard needs to be an independent agency. The Coast Guard’s eleven missions do not fit in any existing department. Six of eleven missions including SAR are not considered DHS missions.

There are at least 39 Independent Executive Agencies include NASA, the CIA, GSA, the postal service (UPS), the Social Security Administration. Many have budgets larger than that of the Coast Guard while many have much smaller budgets, so the size is right.

The Coast Guard can and does represent itself well before Congress. We don’t need to have our needs translated to Congress through a third party who has to be schooled on what the Coast Guard does.