After 9/11, billions of dollars were appropriated in order to modernize and update the Coast Guard’s fleet of patrol boats and other ships. It was an ambitious plan, but one everyone agreed was necessary to enhance our nation’s coastal security. However, four years later, this major effort to bring the Coast Guard into the 21st century is a disaster. Only one new ship has been added to the fleet, and it’s considered structurally unsound by by the Coast Guard’s own engineers. Costs have soared from the initial appropriation of $17 billion to over $24 billion. The New York Times has the story:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 — Four years after the Coast Guard began an effort to replace nearly its entire fleet of ships, planes and helicopters, the modernization program heralded as a model of government innovation is foundering. […]

That has compromised the Coast Guard’s ability to fulfill its mission, which greatly expanded after the 2001 attacks to include guarding the nation’s shores against terrorists. The service has been forced to cut back on patrols and, at times, ignore tips from other federal agencies about drug smugglers. The difficulties will only grow more acute in the next few years as old boats fail and replacements are not ready.

What happened? Privatization happened …

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The modernization effort was a bold experiment, called Deepwater, to build the equivalent of a modest navy — 91 new ships, 124 small boats, 195 new or rebuilt helicopters and planes and 49 unmanned aerial vehicles.

Instead of doing it piecemeal, the Coast Guard decided to package everything, in hopes that the fleet would be better integrated and its multibillion price would command attention from a Congress and White House traditionally more focused on other military branches. And instead of managing the project itself, the Coast Guard hired Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, two of the nation’s largest military contractors, to plan, supervise and deliver the new vessels and helicopters.

Many retired Coast Guard officials, former company executives and government auditors fault that privatization model, saying it allowed the contractors at times to put their interests ahead of the Guard’s.

“This is the fleecing of America,” said Anthony D’Armiento, a systems engineer who has worked for Northrop and the Coast Guard on the project. “It is the worst contract arrangement I’ve seen in all my 20 plus years in naval engineering.”

In other words, the Coast Guard outsourced the oversight function to the defense contractors responsible for the program. Ignoring past practice, which featured oversight by the the service or agency which was to benefit from the program, followed the standard Bush administration solution for every government function: Let the private sector do it! Considering how much we spent in Iraq, this may seem like small potatoes, but the Coast Guard actually is responsible for protecting the Homeland (as opposed to our troops in Iraq whose principle mission seems to be protecting themselves at this point). The result was as predictable as any other Bush rebuilding program from Iraq to Katrina:

Insufficient oversight by the Coast Guard resulted in the service buying some equipment it did not want and ignoring repeated warnings from its own engineers that the boats and ships were poorly designed and perhaps unsafe, the agency acknowledged. The Deepwater program’s few Congressional skeptics were outmatched by lawmakers who became enthusiastic supporters, mobilized by an aggressive lobbying campaign financed by Lockheed and Northrop.

And the contractors failed to fulfill their obligation to make sure the government got the best price, frequently steering work to their subsidiaries or business partners instead of competitors, according to government auditors and people affiliated with the program.

Privatising government doesn’t just cost more, it achieves less: less services to help Americans in need, less law enforcement and less national security. The only ones who get more out of this scam perpetrated on the American taxpayers are the corporations which were awarded these contracts (more profits), their lobbyists (more fees) and corrupt Republican politicians (more campaign contributions). For them it was a sweet deal all around. For the US Coast Guard, and everyone else, it’s a catastrophe.