DEI at Sea: Why the Coast Guard Still Has No New Icebreakers

Imagine a scenario: you pay a contractor $1.7 billion for three new homes. Five years pass. You have no homes. Worse, you're told it will be another five years, and the final cost will now exceed $5 billion. Meanwhile, your neighbor offers to sell you ready-made homes of superior quality for a fifth of the price, deliverable in 24 months. Would you continue with your original contractor? Of course not. But that, astonishingly, is what the United States government has done with our icebreaker fleet.

In 2019, we awarded a defense contract to build three new Polar Security Cutters—essentially, heavy icebreakers—to VT Halter Marine. The total price then was $745.9 million for the first ship, with options for two more. As of this writing in 2025, not one of those ships exists. The lead vessel, originally promised for 2024, now won't be delivered until 2030. Meanwhile, the project's cost has ballooned past $1.7 billion, and when all is said and done, the full program could top $5 billion. It is a case study in bureaucratic waste and misplaced priorities. But more than that, it is a damning indictment of a procurement system subordinated not to merit, efficiency, or national security—but to ideology.

The ideology in question is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). On its face, DEI seems innocuous, even noble. Who objects to inclusion? But in practice, it has metastasized into a bureaucratic cancer, replacing excellence with identity and capability with compliance. Nowhere is this more evident than in defense contracting, where eligibility to bid increasingly depends less on a track record of excellence and more on checking demographic boxes. DEI doesn’t just sit atop the priority list—it is the priority list.

One may ask: is there proof that DEI influenced the icebreaker contract? Consider that the winning shipyard, VT Halter Marine, had a history of underperformance, including cost overruns and delivery delays. It was not chosen for its track record of building polar-class vessels (it had none), nor for speed, nor cost-efficiency. Yet it secured the contract—only to be sold later to Bollinger Shipyards amid performance failures. Why?

Because the procurement process no longer elevates the most competent bidder. It elevates the most compliant. Contractors now submit "equity action plans" alongside technical bids. They disclose supplier diversity metrics, workforce demographics, and ESG credentials. One must not merely promise to build a ship—one must promise to build it with a sufficiently diverse team, using environmentally and socially approved methods, and with deference to every imaginable political concern unrelated to maritime engineering. That is the sine qua non of modern federal contracting.

Meanwhile, Finland builds icebreakers. Real ones. On time. Under budget. In 2016, the Finnish ship Polaris was delivered for under $150 million. Today, that same vessel could be replicated for $250 million and delivered within two years. They have the shipyards, the skilled labor, and the technical expertise. The United States has none of these, because we outsourced capability in favor of diversity.

President Trump understands this. Earlier this month, he hosted Finland's President at Mar-a-Lago. The two men played golf, but the real work came off the fairway. They discussed, among other matters, U.S.-Finnish cooperation on icebreakers. Trump, never one for euphemism, suggested we should simply buy the ships from Finland and end this charade of pretending VT Halter/Bollinger can deliver. He’s right.

The strategic implications of our incompetence are stark. Today, the United States operates just one heavy icebreaker—the aging USCGC Polar Star—and a single medium vessel, the Healy. That’s two ships. Russia, by contrast, commands a fleet of roughly 40 icebreakers, including eight nuclear-powered heavy icebreakers with more on the way. By 2035, they plan to add seven more. This gives them year-round operational control of the Arctic, allowing them to escort commercial convoys, assert territorial claims, and exploit vast energy reserves while we watch from the sidelines.

The Arctic is not just a frozen expanse; it is a theater of economic, environmental, and military consequence. As ice recedes, shipping routes once impassable become contested. Whoever can navigate the Arctic can control global trade lanes, resource flows, and strategic chokepoints. Today, that is Russia—not us. And the reason, in part, is because Russia rejects DEI orthodoxy. They focus on capability. We focus on compliance. The results speak for themselves.

Of course, critics will bristle. "What about American jobs?" they ask. But this retort inverts the truth. We do not save American jobs by awarding contracts to incompetent domestic firms that never deliver. We destroy them. We destroy the reputation of American industry. We destroy the trust of taxpayers. And we destroy the morale of skilled workers who are passed over in favor of those who happen to meet the DEI profile of the month. We gain nothing by awarding shipbuilding contracts to firms that can neither build ships nor meet deadlines.

The answer, then, is not to abandon American industry. The answer is to rebuild it—but on foundations of merit, competition, and national purpose. Shipbuilding should return to America, yes, but only if America remembers how to build. That begins by rejecting the DEI straitjacket and restoring sanity to the procurement process. We must once again ask the only questions that matter: who can build it best? Who can deliver it fastest? Who can defend the nation most effectively?

That is what Trump understood when he floated the idea of buying icebreakers from Finland. He was not surrendering to foreign supply chains. He was acknowledging that Finland has what we once had: an industrial policy rooted in performance. He was making a point—not just about ships, but about a national ethic of competence. It is a point we would do well to absorb.

So let us take this as a pivot. Let the failed icebreaker program stand as a monument to the perils of ideological procurement. Let Mar-a-Lago’s golf course become the place where the ice finally broke—metaphorically and otherwise. Let us bring shipbuilding home, but let us bring it home to the best among us. To welders who know their trade. To designers who care more about hull integrity than HR seminars. To companies that can cut steel faster than they can issue a press release about pronouns.

A nation that cannot build ships cannot defend itself. A nation that cannot choose its builders wisely cannot claim to govern itself rationally. The stakes, then, are higher than dollars and deadlines. They are existential. We must choose excellence. We must demand performance. And we must never again allow ideology to steer the rudder of national security.

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