James' World 2

Hmmmm … Trump Administration wasting money on icebreakers!

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Late one night last August, Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, was at his summer residence two hours west of Helsinki when his phone rang. On the other end of the line was President Trump, calling with a request.

He wanted to buy a fleet of massive ships designed to cut through Arctic ice.

Mr. Trump had long fixated on these hulking vessels, known as polar icebreakers. He viewed them as crucial to dominating the Arctic, where rising temperatures have put key shipping lanes and vast mineral wealth up for grabs. And he was incensed that the United States possessed far fewer than Russia.

Two months later, Mr. Trump and Mr. Stubb were sitting in the Oval Office to announce a deal for 11 icebreakers, worth almost $7 billion, to be built by shipyards in both countries.

The arrangement was unusual in various ways.

The number was twice as many as the Coast Guard, which manages America’s fleet, had said it needed. The contracts for building the ships would be awarded without competitive bids. And while seven of the ships are expected to be built in the United States, the first four would be built in Finland, requiring Mr. Trump to waive a law prohibiting the construction of national security vessels overseas.

At that moment, though, none of that mattered. Mr. Trump wanted more icebreakers, and he wanted them from Finland.

“Other countries have more than we do,” Mr. Trump proclaimed as he sat with the Finnish leader, “and we’re buying the finest icebreakers in the world.”

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President Trump announced a deal to buy 11 icebreakers, some of them from Finland, during an Oval Office meeting with President Alexander Stubb. Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times

 

The story behind Mr. Trump’s personal intervention in Coast Guard ships provides new insights into how his administration has cut corners and flouted rules in pursuit of projects that suit the president’s desires, regardless of whether they fit any broader strategic rationale.

The reliance on no-bid contracts, usually reserved for highly specialized or urgent needs, mirrors other recent Trump-driven projects — ranging in scale from renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to a $1.3 billion deal to build a migrant detention center.

A New York Times examination of the Coast Guard deal found it relied on personal appeals from Finland’s president and Mr. Trump’s own view of what constitutes national greatness, along with a fascination with polar icebreakers dating back to a chance encounter in Finland long before he would ever run for president.

It also came with no plan to pay for the infrastructure required to support the 11 new ships or the crews to sail them. Those costs are likely to reach into the billions, according to Coast Guard documents.

Much of the funding is set to come from money set aside for border security in the Republicans’ spending law passed last year, the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which gave the administration wide latitude to pour billions into its priorities with little oversight.

To justify no-bid contracts for icebreakers, the Trump administration invoked a rarely used exemption claiming the awards are in the “public interest” — allowing the government to skip competition while saying little publicly about its rationale.

“We haven’t seen any information or analysis to justify the 11 or to assess the long-term affordability of these decisions,” said Shelby S. Oakley, director of contracting and national security acquisitions for the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office.

The Coast Guard, she said, risks ending up “like a lottery winner who spends all their money buying the mansion, and then goes broke once they realize they don’t have the money to maintain it.”

Administration officials broadly defended the ships as essential for national security. Polar icebreakers allow the Coast Guard to maintain what it calls “presence” in the Arctic — monitoring foreign vessels operating in the region’s increasingly strategic waterways.

“President Trump is restoring America’s status as a great Arctic power after previous administrations allowed our ships and Arctic capacity to rust and decay,” Allie McCandless, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, said in a statement.

The commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Kevin E. Lunday, said the service abided by laws and regulations “to ensure appropriate stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”

“The number 11 came directly from the president,” Admiral Lunday told The Times. He said the Coast Guard provided input, but added: “This was the president’s number and the president’s decision.”

The president has bragged about the deal.

“I’m gonna be there at the dedication,” he told graduates at the United States Coast Guard Academy in May. “They have been trying to get icebreakers for years and years, and no president was able to provide them with what you need to get it done.”

A Golf Game, and a Gift

Mr. Trump’s interest in Finnish icebreakers can be traced back more than 30 years.

The future president, then a hotel and casino mogul facing bankruptcies in New York and Atlantic City, flew to Helsinki in 1992 to look for new ways to make money.

Mr. Trump was interested in buying a ship to turn into a floating casino, according to Juha Wiskari, a Finnish shipping executive who met with Mr. Trump and gave him a tour of one of his company’s vessels. Mr. Trump dropped the idea, Mr. Wiskari said in an interview, once he realized the cost of operating the ship would make it hard to turn a profit.

But the visit proved significant for another reason. Mr. Trump had seen Finnish icebreakers docked nearby and wondered what they were, another shipping executive, Martin Saarikangas, later told Finland’s public broadcaster. He recalled telling Mr. Trump that Finland had built about 60 percent of the world’s icebreakers.

Vesa Laitinen for The New York Times

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