Coast Guard Adopts Reforms after Committee Hearing on Deepwater Contract

On February 8, 2007, the Committee held a hearing that examined procurement and oversight problems in the Coast Guard’s Deepwater program, a multi-year $24 billion plan to refurbish the Coast Guard’s offshore fleet. The hearing identified the Coast Guard’s decision to turn over the design and production of the new ships to a private-sector entity called Integrated Coast Guard Systems (ICGS), a joint venture of defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, as a key cause of cost overruns and defective ships. In April 2007, the Coast Guard announced it was taking control of the project away from ICGS and was initiating proceedings to recoup some of the taxpayer funds ICGS had used to build the defective ships.