Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

5. Department of Homeland Security · Notable

Refocus the Coast Guard on home waters and the Exclusive Economic Zone

Not started

155 5. Department of Homeland Security

“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).”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    The service's own doctrine has now been read, and it declines the ask in the same breath as it half-echoes it. Action Order 26-02, *FIGHT: How We Operate*, is the Commandant's statement of "how and where we conduct the full range of statutory missions", and it does narrow the frame to "the U.S. homeland and its approaches far at sea" across four operational domains. But the domains are drawn far wider than the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone the Quote names: the first runs "from the inland navigable waterways and Great Lakes, along the U.S. border and its approaches, **throughout the Caribbean and western hemisphere**", and the order goes on to direct a plan to transform PATFORSWA into an expeditionary cutter squadron operating "in the southern maritime approaches of the Western Hemisphere and in the Pacific". The EEZ appears once, as "remote areas of U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone in Oceania" inside the Pacific domain, not as the boundary of the mission. The Commandant's Intent of January 2026 is the same shape — the missions are to "control, secure, and defend the U.S. border and maritime approaches" — and Coast Guard Action Order 1 of 2025-01-21 increased operational presence rather than contracting it. No instrument narrows the service's mission scope to home waters and the EEZ.

  2. Not started

    Moved the other way. The Coast Guard's operational focus in the window has been the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean, thousands of miles beyond the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone: Operation Pacific Viper, launched in August 2025, had interdicted more than 100,000 pounds of cocaine in the Eastern Pacific by 2025-10-15, averaging about 1,600 pounds a day across 34 interdictions, and DHS presents it as a surge of forces away from home waters. Congress pushed the same way: the Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2025 (Division G of Public Law 119-60, enacted 2025-12-18) requires an annual plan for Coast Guard operations in the Pacific and a feasibility study on additional port visits and deployments in the Northern Mariana Islands in support of Operation Blue Pacific, plus an annual plan for Caribbean operations. No instrument narrows the service's mission scope to home waters and the EEZ.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

One negative search covered the Coast Guard asks on pages 151–158 of the Chapter, this one among them. The Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2025 contains no reference to the exclusive economic zone; Federal Register full-text search over the window returns no Coast Guard mission-scope document; whitehouse.gov presidential actions carry no order narrowing the service’s missions.

Coast Guard doctrine read, 2026-09-05. The Coast Guard’s site was never blocked: uscg.mil without “www” does not resolve, www.uscg.mil opens, and the doctrine is published as PDFs on media.defense.gov, linked from the Coast Guard’s Always Ready page (www.uscg.mil/alwaysready). Read in full for this item: the Commandant’s Intent (January 2026), Action Order 26-02 FIGHT: How We Operate (2026-06-17), Action Order 26-01 (2026-01-28), Coast Guard Action Orders 1 and 2 (2025-01-21, 2025-01-29), the Force Design 2028 Executive Report (May 2025) and the Force Design 2028 Initial Update Report (January 2026). The answer is in the note: the doctrine narrows the frame to the homeland and then draws the homeland to include the whole western hemisphere.

  • news.uscg.mil’s search box cannot be used for a negative, like state.gov’s. It returns a “Search Results” page whose length is identical for “Utqiagvik”, “icebreaker” and a nonsense string — the result list is drawn in the browser and the query is never applied. No negative may be recorded from it. The article listings by region are drawn in the browser too. What can be listed in full is the Always Ready page and the numbered news listings on sister commands.

Related: #274 (p. 135) asks that the Coast Guard be moved to DOJ and is not started.

Action
restrict
Object
U.S. Coast Guard mission scope
ID
395