The House Appropriations Committee (HAC) yesterday marked up a $38.9 billion spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in FY ’14 with increases proposed for the acquisition accounts of the Coast Guard and the Air and Marine Office of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
The proposed bill, which must still be approved by the House, would trim the Obama administration’s budget request by nearly $35 million, in line with a proposal by the HAC Homeland Security Subcommittee last week (Defense Daily, May 17). The Senate Appropriations Committee must still mark-up its version of the DHS spending bill for approval by the full Senate and the House and Senate must negotiate any differences in their respective measures before sending a combined bill to the president for his signature.
The House appropriators provide $1.2 billion for Coast Guard acquisition programs, $271.6 million more than the service requested, including an increase of $130 million for two more Fast Response Cutters built by Bollinger Shipyards, $30 million for the replacement costs of two MH-60 helicopters, $15 million for C4ISR, and $91.7 million for a missionized Long Range Surveillance Aircraft. The bill also includes $603.6 million for construction of the seventh National Security Cutter (NSC) and long-lead materials for the eighth and final NSC, which are being built by Huntington Ingalls Industries [HII].
A report accompanying yesterday’s mark-up warns that the latest Capital Investment Plan proposed by the Coast Guard shows that planned acquisition budgets are not closing the service’s gap in mission hours. The report says the mission gap related to major cutters “remains unattainable through 2030,” and directs the Coast Guard to develop a new Mission Needs Statement in light of a more constrained fiscal environment.
“The committee cannot continue to accept a requirements document that is doubted by the senior leader of the Coast Guard,” pointing to a comment by Commandant Adm. Bob Papp at a hearing of the Homeland Security Subcommittee in April that the current patrol boat hour requirement is “’specious.’”
The appropriators also added handsomely to CBP’s request for its Air and Marine branch, recommending $802.7 million, a $375 million plus-up. Most of the increase, $292.8 million, would go toward overtime and pay, with the rest of the boost split between operations and maintenance and procurement.
The increase in procurement includes the acquisition of two Sierra Nevada Corp.-built Multirole Enforcement Aircraft, a boost to the service life extension program of the Lockheed Martin [LMT] P-3 surveillance aircraft, and the conversion of two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.
Following the release of a report by the Government Accountability Office earlier this month that operational tests by DHS of electronic card readers at select seaports produced incomplete and unreliable data, the House appropriators fenced $30 million of the Transportation Security Administration headquarters’ budget pending the completion of a security assessment of the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) program (Defense Daily, May 10). The Coast Guard recently issued a rulemaking announcement related to the pending deployment of the TWIC card readers to enable access by port workers to secure areas of the nation’s seaports.