The United States Coast Guard USCG

Alexander Hamilton asked Congress for ten armed cutters to stop smugglers from evading the tariffs that funded the new government, and the Revenue Cutter Service was created on August 4, 1790, making it the oldest continuous seagoing service in the country. On January 28, 1915, it merged with the Life-Saving Service to form the Coast Guard, and over the next decades it absorbed the Lighthouse Service and the Bureau of Marine Inspection. It moved from the Treasury to the Department of Transportation in 1967 and to Homeland Security in 2003.

The Coast Guard is one of the six armed services and, by law, a military service at all times, but unlike the others it sits outside the Defense Department and holds law enforcement authority, so it can board ships and arrest people in a way the Navy cannot. Its missions span search and rescue, which saves several thousand lives a year, interdiction of drugs and migrants at sea, port security, fisheries enforcement, icebreaking in the Arctic and Great Lakes, aids to navigation, oil spill response, and the inspection and licensing of commercial vessels and mariners. In wartime, or when the President directs, it can operate as part of the Navy, as it has in every major American war.

About 42,000 active duty members and 7,000 reservists serve, along with about 9,000 civilians and a volunteer auxiliary of some 20,000. The Commandant, a four-star admiral, sits on the Joint Chiefs only by invitation, a long-standing grievance. The Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, trains its officers. Its fleet of cutters, boats, and aircraft is among the oldest in the federal government, and its only heavy polar icebreaker entered service in 1976. A program to build new icebreakers has run years late.

The service has long been asked to do more with a budget that has not kept up, a gap its leaders call the mission-to-resource mismatch. In 2025 its Commandant was removed in the first days of the new administration, and the service was directed to increase migrant interdiction and border operations. The 2025 budget law provided about 25 billion dollars for new cutters, icebreakers, and aircraft, the largest single investment in its history. A reorganization effort, called Force Design 2028, aims to restructure the service around those new resources.