The Coast Guard’s top acquisition official Tuesday said the service expects the long-delayed first Polar Security Cutter (PSC) to finally start construction by December.
Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee’s subcommittee on transportation and maritime security, pressed Coast Guard officials on the PSC timetable and long delays during a Tuesday hearing after hearing analyses and criticism from Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Congressional Research Service experts.
Vice Adm. Paul Thomas, Deputy Commandant for Mission Support, U.S. Coast Guard said the service intends to start construction on the PSC late this year.
“Probably in December. We are currently building prototype modules that will become part of the ship. We will not be at the level of design maturity that the GAO would like to see when we do that,” Thomas admitted.
Thomas also alleged the initial PSC contractor “I believe, decided they were going to try to get out of this deal. And they essentially stopped designing the ship. They made very, very little progress. They talked about their subcontractor not delivering, etc. Now that we have a new prime contractor, we’re making very good progress on that detailed design. We have taken some actions and restructured the contract to put additional resources after more engineers, for example.”
Bollinger Shipyards is the current shipbuilder for the PSC, after it acquired the original contractor, Halter Marine, in November 2022.
Halter Marine originally received a $1.9 billion contract for the detailed design and construction of up to three ships and in 2021 was awarded another contract for the second vessel.
Last year, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan said Bollinger was expected to start building the PSC in early 2024, and it would be “at least a four-year project to build that ship” (Defense Daily, July 13, 2023).
Since Thomas is due to retire soon, Gimenez said he would call in his successor in December to confirm construction has started on the lead PSC.
In the first panel of the hearing with the independent government analysts, Eric Labs, Senior Analyst for Naval Forces and Weapons at the CBO, said in the five years since the PSC was awarded, “the Coast Guard’s design estimate of the ship’s lightship displacement, a key indicator of costs, grew by 40%, while its cost estimate for three ship program increased by just 16%. Regardless of the contract structure, that was going to be an untenable situation.”
He said even though ship design is still incomplete, the Coast Guard is hoping the shipyard will be able to start “substantial construction on the lead ship early next year, with an estimated delivery date in 2029.”
“The Coast Guard expects to release a revised estimate of the cost of the three ship polar security program later this year,” Labs added.
Shelby Oakley, Director of Contracting and National Security Acquisitions at the GAO, said according to their most recent information, the Coast Guard told the office they are currently at 67 percent functional design complete.
“GAO’s best practices would say that you should have 100 percent of your basic and functional design complete by the time you begin construction, including systems that run throughout the ship called distributive systems. So the Coast Guard, I know, is hoping to make the case to start construction by the end of the year. And so 67 percent to 100 is quite a lot of work to happen over the remainder of the year to hit that mark, or even at their own marker of 95%, which is different than ours. It’s a significant amount of work remaining.”