The bill
Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2025
HR. 4275, 119th Congress — read as touching Defense Contractors.
Sponsored by
Rep. Graves, Sam [R-MO-6]
ID: G000546
Follow the money
The bill
HR. 4275, 119th Congress — read as touching Defense Contractors.
The sponsor
Every bill has someone who introduced it. That name is where the paper trail starts.
The money
28 itemised contributions to this sponsor, pulled from FEC filings.
The alignment
This bill's text tracks the "Department of Homeland Security" section, p. 189-191 of the Mandate for Leadership.
Track this bill's progress through the legislative process
Latest Action
Received in the Senate and Read twice and referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
July 22, 2025
📍 Current Status
Next: Both chambers must agree on the same version of the bill.
1. Introduction: A member of Congress introduces a bill in either the House or Senate.
2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.
3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.
4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.
5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.
6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.
7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!
Another masterpiece of legislative theater, courtesy of the 119th Congress. The Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2025, a bill that's about as exciting as a root canal without anesthesia. Let's dissect this monstrosity, shall we?
The total funding amount for this bill is a whopping $13.4 billion, because who needs fiscal responsibility when you can just throw money at a problem? The Coast Guard gets the lion's share, with $12.1 billion allocated for operations and maintenance, $1.2 billion for acquisition, and $100 million for research and development. Because, clearly, the Coast Guard was just missing that extra $100 million to finally solve the mystery of the missing life jackets.
Key programs and agencies receiving funds include the Coast Guard's beloved icebreaker program, which gets a cool $150 million, because who doesn't love a good game of "Icebreaker Limbo"? The National Coast Guard Museum also gets a nice chunk of change, $20 million, to be exact, because priorities. And, of course, the ever-popular "Miscellaneous" category gets a whopping $500 million, because who needs transparency when you can just throw money at a problem?
Notable increases from previous years include a 10% bump in funding for Coast Guard personnel, because our brave men and women in uniform deserve a raise... or at least that's what the politicians will tell you. In reality, it's just a clever way to funnel more money into the pockets of defense contractors. And, let's not forget the $200 million increase for "cybersecurity initiatives", because who doesn't love a good game of "Cyber-Whack-A-Mole"?
Now, about those riders and policy provisions... oh boy, do we have some doozies. There's the obligatory "Buy American" provision, because nothing says "fiscal responsibility" like forcing the Coast Guard to buy overpriced, domestically-produced equipment. And, of course, the bill includes a lovely little rider that prohibits the Coast Guard from using any funds to "promote or encourage" the use of lead-based paints, because who needs actual environmental regulation when you can just slap a band-aid on the problem?
Fiscally speaking, this bill is a disaster waiting to happen. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will increase the deficit by $1.2 billion over the next five years, but hey, who's counting? It's not like we're mortgaging our future or anything. And let's not forget the opportunity cost of all this spending... what could we have done with that money instead? Maybe, I don't know, fix some actual problems?
In conclusion, the Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2025 is a perfect example of legislative malpractice. It's a bloated, wasteful, and corrupt bill that prioritizes special interests over actual national security needs. But hey, at least it's a great way to line the
Rep. Graves, Sam [R-MO-6]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
No PAC contributions found
No committee contributions found
This bill has 4 cosponsors. Below are their top campaign contributors.
ID: L000560
Top Contributors
36
ID: E000235
Top Contributors
29
ID: C001112
Top Contributors
38
ID: W000806
Top Contributors
20
Hub layout: Politicians in center, donors arranged by type in rings around them.
Showing 36 nodes and 43 connections
Total contributions: $43
Showing top 22 donors by contribution amount
Which industries are materially affected by specific provisions in this bill. 11 helped.
Section 233 restricts acquisition of vessels in foreign shipyards, which benefits domestic defense contractors by reserving contracts for U.S. shipyards. Section 235 allows entities other than the Coast Guard to contract for acquisition of vessels funded under Public Law 119-21, creating opportunities for defense contractors to participate in Coast Guard procurement.
Section 521 requires a report on Coast Guard whistleblower protections, which includes discussion of professional standards and support for whistleblowers, potentially benefiting health insurers through increased reporting and compliance activities.
Section 234 mandates a strategy for Great Lakes icebreaker design and construction, and a report on Bay class icebreaking tug fleet replacement, which will drive contracts for construction and engineering firms. Section 214 requires tsunami preparedness plans for Coast Guard properties, involving infrastructure assessments and potential construction.
Section 515 mandates Coast Guard policy for care and support of victims of covered misconduct, which may increase demand for medical services from hospitals and health systems.
Section 348 expands offshore operations to include non-mineral energy production (e.g., wind, wave), which could benefit energy infrastructure companies involved in offshore renewable energy projects. Section 322 studies Bering Strait vessel traffic, which may support Arctic energy infrastructure development.
Section 515 requires care and support for victims of covered misconduct, which could include long-term care services for ongoing trauma recovery.
+ 5 more industries not shown.
For each industry this bill affects, here's what the sponsor (Rep. Graves, Sam [R-MO-6])received from donors associated with that industry during the 2022–present cycles. Donations are not proof of intent — they are a record of who funds the people writing the law.
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document.AI-enhanced analysis provides detailed alignment ratings.
AI Analysis:
"The bill aligns strongly with Project 2025's Coast Guard objectives by authorizing funding for acquisitions (including polar security cutters), establishing oversight mechanisms for major acquisitions, creating a National Advisory Committee on Autonomous Maritime Systems, and supporting Arctic and Pacific maritime security initiatives—all of which reflect the policy's emphasis on fleet modernization, strategic prioritization in the Pacific, and improved coordination."
— 156 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise New Policies The Coast Guard’s mission set should be scaled down to match congressio- nal budgeting in the long term, with any increased funding going to acquisitions based on an updated Fleet Mix Analysis. The current shipbuilding plan is insuf- ficient based on USCG analysis, and the necessary numbers of planned Offshore Patrol Cutters and National Security Cutters are not supported by congressional budgets. The Coast Guard should be required to submit to Congress a long-range shipbuilding plan modeled on the Navy’s 30-Year Shipbuilding Plan. Ideally this should become part of the Navy plan in a new comprehensive naval long-range shipbuilding plan to ensure better coherency in the services’ requirements. Outside of home waters, and following the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, the Coast Guard should prioritize limited resources to the nation’s expansive Pacific waters to counter growing Chinese influence and encroachment. Expansion of facilities in American Samoa and basing of cutters there is one clear step in this direction and should be accelerated; looking to free association states (Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands) for enhanced and persistent presence, assuming adequate congressional funding, is another such step. The Secretary of the Navy should convene a naval board to review and reset requirements for Coast Guard wartime mission support. To inform and validate these updated requirements, the Chief of Naval Operations and the Coast Guard Commandant should execute dedicated annual joint wartime drills focused on USCG’s wartime missions in the Pacific (the money for these activities should be allocated from DOD). An interagency maritime coordination office focused on developing and overseeing comprehensive efforts to advance the nation’s mari- time interests and increase its military and commercial competitiveness should be established. Given the USCG’s history of underfunded missions, if the Coast Guard is to con- tinue to maintain the Arctic mission, money to do so adequately will be required over and above current funding levels. Consideration should be given to shifting the Arctic mission to the Navy. Either way, the Arctic mission should be closely coordinated with our Canadian, Danish, and other allies. Personnel USCG is facing recruitment challenges similar to those faced by the military services. The Administration should stop the messaging on wokeness and diversity and focus instead on attracting the best talent for USCG. Simultaneously, consis- tent with the Department of Defense, USCG should also make a serious effort to re-vet any promotions and hiring that occurred on the Biden Administration’s watch while also re-onboarding any USCG personnel who were dismissed from service for refusing to take the COVID-19 “vaccine,” with time in service credited — 157 — Department of Homeland Security to such returnees. These two steps could be foundational for any improvements in the recruiting process. U.S. SECRET SERVICE (USSS) Needed Reforms The U.S. Secret Service must be the world’s best protective agency. Currently, the agency is distracted by its dual mission of protection and financial investigations. The result has been a long series of high-profile embarrassments and security fail- ures, perhaps most notably its allowing of then-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to be inside the Democratic National Committee office on January 6, 2021, while a pipe bomb was outside. Despite the great size and scope of the January 6 inves- tigation, this high-profile incident of danger to a protectee remains unresolved. The failures of the USSS protective mission are too numerous to list here. A December 2015 bipartisan report from the House Oversight Committee listed dozens of such incidents as well as needed recommendations for reform.14 This chapter adopts those findings and recommendations in whole, especially the finding that USSS’s dual-mission structure detracts from the agency’s protective capabilities. At the time of that report, USSS agents spent only one-third of their work hours on protection-related activities as opposed to investigative activities. USSS was established initially to investigate counterfeit currency, but its mission has evolved over the decades to prioritize electronic financial crimes. For example, as this chap- ter was being written, all 15 of the USSS’s most wanted individuals were wanted for financial crimes, many of them international in nature. Notably, the last head of the agency left not for a protection-related job, but to be the Chief Security Officer of social media company SnapChat. This is a pattern that has developed over the years, with agents seeking to burnish their online financial crimes credentials to secure corporate security jobs. Coupled with some of the lowest morale in the federal government, the agency has completely lost sight of the primacy of its protective mission. New Policies USSS should transfer to the Department of Justice and Department of the Treasury all investigations that are not related to its protective function. It should begin the logistical operation of closing all field offices throughout the country and internationally to the extent they are not taken over by Treasury or Justice. USSS agents stationed outside of Washington, D.C., should be transferred to work in Immigration and Customs Enforcement field offices where they would continue to be the “boots on the ground” to follow up on threat reports throughout the country and liaise with local law enforcement for visits by protectees.
AI Analysis:
"The bill supports Coast Guard acquisitions, oversight, and Arctic mission funding, aligning with Project 2025's emphasis on fleet modernization, long-range shipbuilding planning, and Arctic mission sustainment. However, it does not explicitly address scaling down missions to match budgeting, prioritizing Pacific waters over other regions, establishing a naval board for wartime requirements, or creating an interagency maritime coordination office as outlined in the policy."
— 156 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise New Policies The Coast Guard’s mission set should be scaled down to match congressio- nal budgeting in the long term, with any increased funding going to acquisitions based on an updated Fleet Mix Analysis. The current shipbuilding plan is insuf- ficient based on USCG analysis, and the necessary numbers of planned Offshore Patrol Cutters and National Security Cutters are not supported by congressional budgets. The Coast Guard should be required to submit to Congress a long-range shipbuilding plan modeled on the Navy’s 30-Year Shipbuilding Plan. Ideally this should become part of the Navy plan in a new comprehensive naval long-range shipbuilding plan to ensure better coherency in the services’ requirements. Outside of home waters, and following the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, the Coast Guard should prioritize limited resources to the nation’s expansive Pacific waters to counter growing Chinese influence and encroachment. Expansion of facilities in American Samoa and basing of cutters there is one clear step in this direction and should be accelerated; looking to free association states (Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands) for enhanced and persistent presence, assuming adequate congressional funding, is another such step. The Secretary of the Navy should convene a naval board to review and reset requirements for Coast Guard wartime mission support. To inform and validate these updated requirements, the Chief of Naval Operations and the Coast Guard Commandant should execute dedicated annual joint wartime drills focused on USCG’s wartime missions in the Pacific (the money for these activities should be allocated from DOD). An interagency maritime coordination office focused on developing and overseeing comprehensive efforts to advance the nation’s mari- time interests and increase its military and commercial competitiveness should be established. Given the USCG’s history of underfunded missions, if the Coast Guard is to con- tinue to maintain the Arctic mission, money to do so adequately will be required over and above current funding levels. Consideration should be given to shifting the Arctic mission to the Navy. Either way, the Arctic mission should be closely coordinated with our Canadian, Danish, and other allies. Personnel USCG is facing recruitment challenges similar to those faced by the military services. The Administration should stop the messaging on wokeness and diversity and focus instead on attracting the best talent for USCG. Simultaneously, consis- tent with the Department of Defense, USCG should also make a serious effort to re-vet any promotions and hiring that occurred on the Biden Administration’s watch while also re-onboarding any USCG personnel who were dismissed from service for refusing to take the COVID-19 “vaccine,” with time in service credited
AI Analysis:
"The bill aligns with Project 2025's focus on strengthening the Coast Guard for great-power competition and protecting U.S. waters, particularly through investments in polar security cutters and maritime security. However, it does not address the policy's call to narrow the Coast Guard's mission scope to the Exclusive Economic Zone or prioritize cost-effective designs, instead maintaining broad operational funding."
— 154 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise insurance at prices lower than the actuarially fair rate, thereby subsidizing flood insurance. Then, when flood costs exceed NFIP’s revenue, FEMA seeks taxpay- er-funded bailouts. Current NFIP debt is $20.5 billion, and in 2017, Congress canceled $16 billion in debt when FEMA reached its borrowing authority limit. These subsidies and bailouts only encourage more development in flood zones, increasing the potential losses to both NFIP and the taxpayer. The NFIP should be wound down and replaced with private insurance starting with the least risky areas currently identified by the program. Budget Issues FEMA manages all grants for DHS, and these grants have become pork for states, localities, and special-interest groups. Since 2002, DHS/FEMA have provided more than $56 billion in preparedness grants for state, local, tribal, and territorial governments. For FY 2023, President Biden requested more than $3.5 billion for federal assistance grants.13 Funds provided under these programs do not provide measurable gains for preparedness or resiliency. Rather, more than any objective needs, political interests appear to direct the flow of nondisaster funds. The principles of federalism should be upheld; these indicate that states better understand their unique needs and should bear the costs of their particularized programs. FEMA employees in Washington, D.C., should not determine how bil- lions of federal tax dollars should be awarded to train local law enforcement officers in Texas, harden cybersecurity infrastructure in Utah, or supplement migrant shelters in Arizona. DHS should not be in the business of handing out federal tax dollars: These grants should be terminated. Accomplishing this, however, will require action by Members of Congress who repeatedly vote to fund grants for political reasons. The transition should focus on building resilience and return on investment in line with real threats. Personnel FEMA currently has four Senate-confirmed positions. Only the Administrator should be confirmed by the Senate; other political leadership need not be con- firmed by the Senate. Additionally, FEMA’s “springing Cabinet position” should be eliminated, as this creates significant unnecessary challenges to the functioning of the whole of DHS at points in time when coordinated responses are most needed. CYBERSECURITY AND INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY AGENCY (CISA) Needed Reforms CISA is supposed to have two key roles: (1) protection of the federal civilian government networks (.gov) while coordinating the execution of national cyber defense and sharing information with non-federal and private-sector partners — 155 — Department of Homeland Security and (2) national coordination of critical infrastructure security and resilience. Yet CISA has rapidly expanded its scope into lanes where it does not belong, the most recent and most glaring example being censorship of so-called misinformation and disinformation. CISA’s funding and resources should align narrowly with the foregoing two mission requirements. The component’s emergency communications and Chem- ical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) roles should be moved to FEMA; its school security functions should be transferred to state homeland security offices; and CISA should refrain from duplicating cybersecurity functions done elsewhere at the Department of Defense, FBI, National Security Agency, and U.S. Secret Service. Of the utmost urgency is immediately ending CISA’s counter-mis/disinforma- tion efforts. The federal government cannot be the arbiter of truth. CISA began this work because of alleged Russian misinformation in the 2016 election, which in fact turned out to be a Clinton campaign “dirty trick.” The Intelligence Commu- nity, including the NSA or DOD, should counter foreign actors. At the time of this writing, release of the Twitter Files has demonstrated that CISA has devolved into an unconstitutional censoring and election engineering apparatus of the political Left. In any event, the entirety of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee should be dismissed on Day One. For election security, CISA should help states and localities assess whether they have good cyber hygiene in their hardware and software in preparation for an election—but nothing more. This is of value to smaller localities, particularly by flagging who is attacking their websites. CISA should not be significantly involved closer to an election. Nor should it participate in messaging or propaganda. U.S. COAST GUARD (USCG) Needed Reforms The U.S. Coast Guard fleet should be sized to the needs of great-power compe- tition, specifically focusing efforts and investment on protecting U.S. waters, all while seeking to find (where feasible) more economical ways to perform USCG missions. The scope of the Coast Guard’s mission needs to be focused on protecting U.S. resources and interests in its home waters, specifically its Exclusive Economic Zone (200 miles from shore). USCG’s budget should address the growing demand for it to address the increasing threat from the Chinese fishing fleet in home waters as well as narcotics and migrant flows in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. Doing this will require reversing years of shortfalls in shipbuilding, maintenance, and upgrades of shore facilities as well as seeking more cost-effective ship and facility designs. In wartime, the USCG supports the Navy, but it has limited capability and capacity to support wartime missions outside home waters.
Showing 3 of 5 policy matches
Policy matches are calculated using a hybrid approach: initial candidates are found using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text, then an AI model (Llama 3.1 70B) provides detailed alignment ratings and analysis. Ratings range from 1 (minimal alignment) to 5 (very strong alignment). This analysis does not imply direct causation or intent.