Marine environmental response (MER)—which encompasses the oil and hazardous materials emergency response and incident management components of the Coast Guard’s marine environmental protection mission—has been a core program of the service since the Clean Water Act was enacted in 1972. For more than five decades, the Coast Guard has investigated and responded to thousands of reports of oil discharges to protect the environment and public health. In 2010, however, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill response exposed several gaps in the service’s preparedness programs, and the Coast Guard Office of Marine Environmental Response Policy promulgated plans to address many of the issues identified.1 Unfortunately, while the oil and gas industry has made significant advances in preparedness and response, including offshore drilling quality-control and safety protocols and new deepwater well capping and containment technology, the Coast Guard’s programs have remained stagnant.
MER needs a new home, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the logical choice.
Coast Guard MER Proficiency in Decline
For most of the Coast Guard’s history, shore-based mission operations were led and managed by marine safety offices (MSOs) and group commands. Around 2005, in many major ports across the country, the Coast Guard merged those local field units into sectors.2 Under this organization, the Prevention Department oversees most legacy marine safety and marine environmental protection programs except MER, which is led and managed in the Response Department’s Incident Management Division. Marine environmental protection activities had been linked at the MSOs, but sectors created workforce divisions between complementary regulatory compliance, pollution investigation, and incident response activities. This restructuring has been detrimental to the marine environmental protection mission, including MER.
MER proficiency and experience have declined, especially across the Coast Guard officer corps. At sector commands and marine safety units (MSUs) today, the senior person with the most MER experience and qualifications is often a petty officer marine safety technician (MST) or a marine safety specialist response (MSSR), a chief warrant officer specialty created after the Deepwater Horizon incident. Rarely is a sector or MSU commanding officer, Response Department head, or even Incident Management Division chief the most seasoned MER professional at a unit.
Coast Guard Office of Personnel Management (OPM) assignment decisions have aggravated the problem, including at major sector commands with the highest MER workloads in the service. For example, the Sector New Orleans Incident Management Division historically investigates and responds to more oil spills and hazardous material incidents than any other major field command. Similarly, Sector Houston-Galveston oversees the three largest oil refineries and the highest concentration of petrochemical facilities in the country. Over the past decade, OPM has assigned a handful of midgrade officers with little or no MER experience to chief of response and chief of incident management positions at both these sector commands.
At the time of the accident, the Deepwater Horizon oil platform was located in the MSU Houma captain of the port zone. That zone encompasses a massive offshore Gulf of Mexico area that contains the largest deepwater oil exploration and production platforms in the country. These deepwater wells also have the largest worst-case discharge potential. In 2016, the Coast Guard transferred the main captain of the port offices and functions from MSU Morgan City to MSU Houma. One of the primary reasons for the change was to move the Outer Continental Shelf Inspections Program closer to Port Fourchon, Louisiana, which is considered the core logistical hub for the offshore oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico. As part of this change, the service downgraded the head of the MSU Houma Response Department from a commander to a lieutenant commander billet. This might be insignificant at Coast Guard units with historically small and manageable oil spill response workloads, but at a major field command on the Gulf Coast, it was short-sighted.
At Coast Guard district commands, which oversee missions and activities across multiple states and large offshore areas of responsibility, senior aviators have filled district chief of incident management positions for almost two decades. These officers oversee several key response-ashore missions and programs, including MER. In almost all cases, they have little or no experience in oil spill response or incident management.
The assumption that any good officer, regardless of specialty, qualifications, or experience, can competently oversee some of the most important response-ashore missions is dangerous. An unqualified officer would not be allowed to fly an aircraft or navigate a cutter, so why does the Coast Guard gamble with critical shore-based leadership positions for a mission that requires significant regulatory knowledge and experience and could endanger lives or the environment?
Since Deepwater Horizon, major offshore oil and gas exploration and production companies have collaborated and poured billions of dollars into improving their capability to respond to subsea oil spills.3 They have held more than a dozen oil spill response exercises, including full-scale exercises with hundreds of participants. Although Coast Guard federal on-scene coordinators have been invited, they have not attended the majority of these exercises.
Coast Guard Headquarters has made a few additions to dedicated MER staffing, including hiring district command incident management and preparedness advisors, who serve as regional civilian MER subject-matter experts. In addition, the new MSSR chief warrant officers, who usually are assigned to large field units with a substantial MER workload, generally have many years of enlisted experience as MSTs and serve as local active-duty MER subject-matter experts and advisors to the federal on-scene coordinator.
While these new positions are steps toward improving MER proficiency and readiness, they represent just a handful of individuals across the service—not nearly enough to move the needle.
MER Is No Longer a Service Priority
Unfortunately, the MER program improvements have been largely overshadowed by larger and more consequential trends across the service.
After 9/11 and the subsequent transfer of the Coast Guard to the newly formed Department of Homeland Security (DHS), both the department and the service have shifted their focus from marine safety and marine environmental protection toward inherently military missions such as port, waterway, and coastal security. The potential for conflict in the Middle East, South China Sea, and Arctic has exacerbated the demand for Coast Guard resources and capabilities and shifted Coast Guard discretionary budgetary spending toward modernizing the aging cutter fleet.
In a May 2019 op-ed entitled “Nearing a ‘Tipping Point,’ Coast Guard Needs Lasting Change,” then–Commandant Admiral Karl Schultz said the modern Coast Guard must “attain optimal military readiness” and be recognized for its critical role in maintaining national security and funded as a military service.4 He made no mention of the Coast Guard’s regulatory authorities or functions, including MER.
At the programmatic level, MER falls under the Assistant Commandant for Response Policy, along with six other major programs: law enforcement; counterterrorism and defense operations; maritime security response; emergency management and disaster response; search and rescue; and the National Response Center. In other words, not only does a single one-star flag officer manage all internal Coast Guard policy and external regulations for the MER program, but his or her attention is split among seven critical response-ashore programs. The overwhelming responsibility and diversity of this massive portfolio leaves minimal opportunity for strategic foresight and substantive advances in programs such as MER, especially against the backdrop of more urgent military and security-focused missions.
MER Is A Misfit Under DHS
During the Deepwater Horizon response, many senior DHS officials were perplexed as to why the Coast Guard, not the EPA, was the lead federal agency for oversight and coordination of all spill response activities. This lack of understanding of and appreciation for one of the Coast Guard’s core regulatory authorities, as well as its federal on-scene coordinator role, led to an unsuccessful campaign within DHS to permanently transition these regulatory oversight functions to the EPA.
The future of MER, as well as the marine environmental protection mission, is not with the U.S. Coast Guard. MER needs a new home. There are few reasons for active-duty military members to investigate, respond to, and enforce regulations regarding oil discharges and hazardous material releases in the coastal zone. The EPA is the more logical home for coastal zone Clean Water Act enforcement and federal on-scene coordinator authority.
Nonetheless, there are major differences in incident types, staffing, funding, and agency cultures that would make consolidation of MER responsibilities within the EPA a challenge. First, the EPA’s bread-and-butter expertise is long-term remediation activities, such as hazardous material cleanup of contaminated sites. The Coast Guard, on the other hand, is renowned for its bias toward action and is better suited for handling complex all-hazards incident responses, including natural disasters, major oil spills, and large commercial vessel salvage. In addition, the Coast Guard has a large pool of talent in its active-duty and reserve workforces to deploy during major incidents such as Deepwater Horizon. The EPA historically has been constrained by staffing during major incidents, forcing the agency to rely on contractors to fill the gap.
If done correctly, the EPA would expand in size, inherit the Coast Guard’s MER program and funding, and have access to potentially hundreds of competent and motivated Coast Guard MER professionals and incident management experts—officer, civilian, and enlisted—all of whom would be ideal candidates for EPA MER program manager and on-scene coordinator roles. That said, the Coast Guard has for decades “reprogrammmed” and directed much of its marine environmental protection mission funding to other functions, including command centers, planning departments, and civilian billets. This funding disparity would need to be resolved before any action was taken to transition the MER program to the EPA.
In the meantime, the Coast Guard must ensure key MER leaders have the requisite qualifications and experience before being assigned to these critical positions, especially on the Gulf Coast. It is also paramount that Coast Guard federal on-scene coordinators, as well as leaders from other federal regulatory agencies, continue engagement with local oil spill response planning committees, take advantage of all available industry-led training and exercise opportunities, and work toward ensuring optimum preparedness for future incidents in their respective ports.
1. BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Incident Specific Preparedness Review (ISPR) Final Report (January 2011).
2. CDR Drew Casey, USCG (Ret.), “The Unintended Consequences of the Coast Guard’s Sector Command,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 149, no. 8 (August 2023).
3. See, for example, “Preparedness: Skill Response Training and Exercises,” www.oilspillprevention.org.
4. ADM Karl L. Schultz, USCG, “Nearing a ‘Tipping Point,’ Coast Guard Needs Lasting Change,” The Hill, 6 May 2019.
