Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Act of 2011

Floor Speech

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Mr. LARSEN of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

The Coast Guard is a multi-mission agency responsible for a broad range of activities including mariner licensing, emergency oil spill response, vessel inspections, and search and rescue operations. These and many other activities of the Coast Guard are indispensable and ensure that our coasts and ocean resources are protected; that our oceans, the Great Lakes, and inland waterways remain safe and efficient; and that our maritime industries continue to be vibrant sources of jobs and economic opportunity for the American people.

I want to thank Chairman LoBiondo for his leadership in developing this legislation, H.R. 2838, the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Act of 2011, to reauthorize the activities of the Coast Guard for fiscal year 2012 through fiscal year 2014.

Although I have reservations that the authorized funding levels in this bill are not sufficient to meet the many well-documented needs of the Coast Guard, at least this bill provides for roughly level funding for the next 3 years. We have had this discussion in committee for the last several months about the Coast Guard, Mr. Chairman, people wanting the Coast Guard to do more with less. The greatest concern that we have is that as we look at funding for the Coast Guard, we're beginning to ask them to do less with less. And that is going to cause future problems for our Coast Guard.

In general, Mr. Chairman, the legislation includes several noncontroversial provisions, especially title II, which addresses issues of disparity in policy and authority between the Coast Guard and other armed services. I want to commend the chairman for his commitment to address this issue.

There are some provisions in this bill, however, which remain problematic, none more so than the provision that would sequentially decommission the Coast Guard's two heavy icebreakers. The administration has expressed its strong opposition to this provision in its statement of administration policy.

At some point, we need to constructively engage the Coast Guard in developing a sound, balanced path forward that realigns our expectations with a level of performance that we can reasonably expect the Coast Guard to deliver, especially for its icebreakers and its polar operations.

With that, Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. LARSEN of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

We have no more speakers on the general debate, so I will take a few minutes here to conclude on our side for general debate, and I appreciate the opportunity to close on general debate.

The points that were made earlier, I do want to reemphasize a few points. One is a concern we have about the decommissioning process and the decommissioning of the two icebreakers that are in the U.S. Coast Guard fleet. The administration has a statement of administration policy, which you've allowed to be entered into the Record. I think a follow-up to that point would be that we certainly would want to hear from the administration sooner rather than later about a plan for what some would call an organic capability of our icebreaker fleet. That is a U.S. Coast Guard-owned and -operated icebreaker fleet, rather than being left with the potential and real possibility of having to lease icebreakers from other countries to do the work that otherwise we would be doing. That continues to be a major concern.

We have heard, as well, concerns about the ballast water title and are expecting amendments and further debate on that as the afternoon progresses.

Certainly we are going to have an en bloc amendment, and we will have time to discuss those. I just want to underscore one of those from Mr. McIntyre and the role that the marine transportation system plays, or the MTS as we call it, which consists of waterways and ports and intermodal land-side connections that allow our various modes of transportation to move people and goods to and from and on the water.

The MTS is vitally important to our economy. It's vitally important to waterborne cargo and the associated activities which contribute more than $649 billion annually to the U.S. gross domestic product, sustaining more than 13 million jobs. Section 401 of this underlying bill would codify the committee on the marine transportation system, a Federal interdepartmental committee chaired by the Secretary of Transportation.

And I think it is just important to underscore further about this MTS, the marine transportation system, and the role that the Coast Guard plays in maintaining that. It can be somewhat invisible to folks if they're not on the water a lot, but the role that the U.S. Coast Guard plays in maintaining that marine transportation system that therefore underlies the economic growth potential that we have from a well-balanced and well-developed marine transportation system is important and is one of the underlying reasons why we even have a Coast Guard authorization bill each year to support the great work of the U.S. Coast Guard.

I would encourage Members to take a hard look at this bill. We've got some amendments coming up that Members will bring up, and we'll have good debate on those. But certainly as far as general debate goes, I'd like to take this time now to yield back the balance of my time and urge people to support the underlying bill.

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Mr. LARSEN of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I rise in support of Mr. LoBiondo's manager's amendment and appreciate its consideration en bloc with other amendments.

In general, the amendment provides helpful technical and clarifying changes to the underlying committee print which will improve the bill. In particular, the provision that grants the Coast Guard discretionary authority to extend the duration of medal certificates is important because it will help ensure that mariners are not left on the dock simply because of administrative backlogs within the Coast Guard preventing the timely issuance of new certificates.

Also I support the inclusion of the amended version of Chairman LoBiondo's piracy legislation, H.R. 2039, the Piracy Suppression Act of 2011, and expect that it will help to strengthen our efforts abroad to address the growing threat piracy poses to maritime commerce.

In regards to additional amendments in the en bloc, Mr. Shuler's Amendment No. 2 is an important one and encourages all federal agencies certainly to enter into contracts and buy products produced in the U.S., creating jobs for Americans, and the Coast Guard should be no exception.

With regards to Mr. Cummings' amendment, I am certainly supportive of that. It mirrors H.R. 3202. Waivers granted by the Maritime Administration this past summer to allow foreign-flagged vessels to transport oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to other areas in U.S. territorial waters raised legitimate concerns that the administrative waiver process lacked transparency and accountability. This amendment would establish new notice and justification requirements for waivers of our Coast Guard's laws and would help to ensure that our merchant fleet is not unnecessarily disadvantaged in the future.

With regards to Mr. Murphy's amendment, the gentleman from Connecticut, I can think of no reason why it would not be appropriate for the Coast Guard, when it is soliciting for competitive proposals, to also seek optional job impact statements from these companies bidding on the contract. This will allow the contract officer to assess not only cost comparisons, but also job creation comparisons when making an award and would serve the interests of both the Federal Government and the offerer. This would appear to me to be a good way at little or not cost to better leverage the job-creating potential of contracts awarded by the Coast Guard. And certainly I want to thank the chairman for including Mr. Murphy's amendment into the en bloc amendment.

Mr. Chair, certainly there are a few other amendments that folks can speak to at the time that they wish, but we have no objection to the en bloc, and we encourage its support and its passage.

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. LARSEN of Washington. I support Mr. Cummings' amendment striking the provision in the underlying bill that would eliminate the requirement for the Coast Guard to establish ombudsmen in Coast Guard districts around the country.

In committee, Mr. Cummings offered and subsequently withdrew his amendment in the hope that some compromise could be reached. Because the program is little more than a year old, I suggest that it might be premature for Congress to repeal this new program. But I certainly do want to recognize the work that Mr. Cummings and Mr. LoBiondo did to try to find some accommodation.

But I do encourage people to support this amendment to allow the ombudsman program to continue so that we might be better able to get a fair evaluation of the program in the future.

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Mr. LARSEN of Washington. Mr. Chair, I support Mr. Thompson's amendment to insert a congressional nomination process for admission to the United States Coast Guard.

This provision, which was included in Coast Guard legislation that passed the House during the 111th Congress, would establish the same process to allow Members of Congress the opportunity to nominate individuals for entrance into the Coast Guard Academy.

I realize that the Coast Guard does not support the Congress imposing a nomination process on the agency, but if it does result in a more diverse workforce within the Coast Guard, we will all be better for it, including the Coast Guard, too.

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