That is so friggin ugly....

1. Then give the patrol boats to the Navy, because they clearly are not needed to patrol the US coast line.

I know they do all of those things, my point is, none of those three issues have anything to do with guarding Americas coastline.

Why should a guy in Kansas subsidize the safety enforcement of a guy in a bass boat in Illinois, after he already subsidized it through the recreational boating safety grant from the Coast Guard to the State of Illinois?

Or perhaps an argument for controlling agency adventurism to control spending.

My point exactly. As the government reassesses priorities and spend, which governments should always do, consider this one area where the Coast Guard is devoting significant resources on an activity that has absolutely nothing to do with guarding the American coast.

1. Posse commutative has nothing to do with it. The Coast Guard should be guarding our coasts, not fooling around in the Persian gulf. That is purely a choice (and a costly one)

Oh, and an honorable mention:

Here are a few:

The Coast Guard itself can and should argue for focus, and they do plenty, like deploy cutters to the Persian Gulf, that they should not do.

My point is, it shouldn’t be.

I agree. I also point out the illogic argument that the Coast Guard is necessary for border control, and yet they spend a fortune on missions inconsistent with being a border control force.

Life jackets don’t stop search and rescue missions. The presence of life jacket will not prevent a sinking, and inspecting them does nothing to prevent search and rescue missions.

Why should federal resources be spent inspecting recreational boats registered by a state?

Cut it and the focus will come.

Let’s not forget the use of the Coast Guard’s largest icebreaker each year in .... Antarctica.... which has nothing to do with the US Coast, and is an example of an agency completely out of focus.

“I see a lot of them in the building having lunch”.....

Which is a completely useless federal expense and a good place to start cutting. You don’t see the army , inspecting pickup trucks on the interstate, do you?

The problem is not the one the Coast Guard caught, but the many they didn’t catch. The DEA estimates a full one third of the cocaine entering the US by sea is transported on narco subs, but their incidence of capture is very low, and we’ve never caught one offloading in the US.

How can lightning be struck by lightning?