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Return to Article: GAO: Costs of Coast Guard modernization to soar by $2 billion

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  I think they should cut the foreign aid budget to zero and distribute the money to the Coast Guard, Border Patrol, CIA and FBI.

  Don Jones Posted July 9, 2009 2:56 PM
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  And the loss of seasoned contracts professionals will no doubt be overcome by??? ...appointment of a new Admiral. Yea Thad, the costs will go down - when those 8 boats become seaworthy.

  How many times have we heard this bull?

  When was the 60 Minutes segment on Deep Water, two - three years ago?

  There is another Service that can buy and manage the ship building if the Coast Guard cannot.

  Gnatman Posted July 8, 2009 12:53 PM
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  A significant portion of the budget increase is to cover the hundreds of millions of dollars the Coast Guard is paying the contractors to do work they were already on the hook to provide. This is occurring because the Coast Guard covered for huge mistakes on the 123s that were then propagated to the NSC. Since the Coast Guard (and DHS IG) allowed Lockheed to get away with saying a huge portion of their work was not in the requirements (which the Coast guard and IG did to cover for their lack of oversight) they were able to modify the contract and ask for hundreds of millions more to do work they already were under contract to perform. To make matters work that work on the 123s and NSC is severely flawed. Finally the Coast Guard and other government organizations have now gone 2 years in not being able to secure refunds to offset these costs. As a matter of fact a recent DHS IG report actually contradicts statements they have made in previous public reports and invalidates huge portions of the refund requests. Hopefully the DoJ will step up their involvement in our case and help us sort this out.

  Michael DeKort Posted July 8, 2009 7:42 AM