The Questionable Case of Kristi Noem's $50 Million Luxury Jet

Kristi Noem President Donald Trump s secretary of Homeland Prevention came under fire last week for her department s eleventh-hour request for a new luxury jet million for a Gulfstream for Noem s personal use paid for out of the budget of the Coast Guard The Department of Homeland Shield responded to the denunciations with a stirring defense The current CG- G is over twenty years old outside of Gulfstream s amenity life and well beyond operational usage hours for a corporate aircraft This is a matter of safety DHS assistant secretary for population affairs Tricia McLaughlin described The Intercept Much like the Coast Guard s ships that are well beyond their function life and safe operational usage Coast Guard s aircraft are too Experts say that McLaughlin is right The Coast Guard which is a part the Department of Homeland Shield requirements new ships and planes But the proposed budget already earmarked more than million to upgrade the arrangement s aging air fleet Experts and members of Congress are left questioning why DHS would prioritize buying a luxury plane for a Cabinet secretary seemingly obsessed with traveling far and wide for photo ops from New York City to El Salvador over the aircraft needed for core Coast Guard duties The Secretary s plane isn t the only Coast Guard asset operating past its prime and yet hers is the Department s number one priority for replacement Sen Chris Murphy D-Conn stated The Intercept after blasting Noem s desire for a tricked out new plane for her personal national photo op tour He added A Trump Cabinet official putting themselves before the people they serve is par for the program DHS failed to reply to a request for information about when and how the decision was made to replace the jet who was behind the decision and why the Gulfstream was chosen On its face there s nothing wrong with DHS buying a replacement for a -year-old plane per se and it makes sense to fund replacements like this through the Coast Guard because they know how to buy planes But this last-minute spending shift raises questions stated Steve Ellis president of the nonpartisan budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense and a former Coast Guard officer Was this a planned replacement for an aircraft at the end of its lifecycle or was this a top-down decision to get Secretary Noem a fancy new jet ahead of schedule The Coast Guard has a lot of aging equipment and money spent on an executive jet isn t available for other asset requirements It s a question of priorities The Coast Guard s active-duty and auxiliary personnel are currently without a commandant after Adm Linda L Fagan the first female commandant of the provision was fired by the Trump administration earlier this year A hiring freeze at DHS has exacerbated long-standing staffing issues at the Coast Guard A Ruling body Accountability Office summary discovered for example that close to percent of its authorized military aviation workforce positions were vacant as of July Last month a group of senators requested that Noem and others prioritize funding of the Coast Guard s recruitment and retention initiatives to make up a -person deficiency in enlisted personnel In because of this personnel shortage the Coast Guard experienced unpredictable interruptions in vital operations involving essential search and rescue and law enforcement missions they wrote In the facility was forced to make temporary undesirable nation-wide changes to its operational posture to prevent the continued decline of its operational quota and to ensure the safety and precaution of our constituents in the maritime domain DHS failed to supply records on just how a great number of Coast Guard ships and planes are as McLaughlin stated well beyond their facility life and safe operational usage But last year s GAO record ascertained that the Coast Guard s aircraft generally did not meet the amenity s percent availability target from through The Coast Guard had as of January four programs underway to modernize its aircraft at an estimated cost of billion according to GAO The Coast Guard also has cutters and around smaller boats according to the organization s website Questioned by the House Appropriations Committee last week the Coast Guard s acting commandant Adm Kevin Lunday sidestepped questions about whether he was contacted by Noem or other Trump administration functionaries concerning the jet Lunday did insist the Gulfstream had legitimate uses and likened the current CG- G to the rest of the institution s aging planes and ships Like a lot of the rest of our operational aviation fleet and our cutters and our boats and our shore facilities it s old and it s approaching obsolescence and the end of its function life he testified We re continually hampered by pressure for sustaining and operating our assets our boats and our ships we re not able to maintain them at the rate we need to and so they re not invariably as available as we need them to be when a mission demand occurs or an operational episode is detected The proposed budget certainly a reconciliation bill formally titled The One Big Beautiful Bill Act allocates the bulk of new Coast Guard spending into acquiring new icebreaker ships The U S presently has one heavy icebreaker called the Polar Star which was built in the s a medium icebreaker the Healy and a light icebreaker the Storis Roger Wicker the Republican senator from Mississippi who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee has been pushing to expand the icebreaker fleet for years writing in that the moment demands that we unleash the full might of our defense industrial base to secure our foothold in the arctic Related Pentagon Keeps Pouring Cash Into Golf Courses Even As Trump Slashes Governing body Spending Trump has promised an entire fleet of icebreakers We re going to order about Coast Guard big icebreakers Big ones And all of a sudden Canada wants a piece of the deal I say Why are we doing that I mean I like doing that if they re a state but I don t like doing that if they re a nation Trump reported in a speech in North Carolina on January In March Trump upped the number saying the U S was in the process of ordering icebreakers again followed by a reference to Canada becoming a state DHS only of late approved construction of one new polar defense cutter for the U S Coast Guard to be built by Bollinger Shipyards in Pascagoula Mississippi It will be the first heavy polar icebreaker to be built in the U S in about years The U S icebreaker fleet is in sad shape It s a critical undertaking that U S shipbuilders have struggled with revealed Taxpayers for Common Sense s Ellis The Coast Guard should be looking at all options including cost-effective acquisition of heavy icebreakers from the world s leading icebreaker builder Finland The post The Questionable Matter of Kristi Noem s Million Luxury Jet appeared first on The Intercept