A Coast Guard secretary could be coming, but they will need help.

At this year’s US Coast Guard Academy commencement, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem unveiled Force Design 2028, offering a vision for the service’s future. Among its proposals was a bold idea: establishing a secretary of the Coast Guard.

The irony is, this bold idea comes as the Trump Administration is dismantling much of the national security enterprise, even within DHS’s cyber workforce, and has emphasized cutting government jobs overall. And yet, an impulse to build is exactly right.

While establishing a secretary is a significant maturing step, pursuing it in isolation would be unwise.  Without the accompanying bureaucratic infrastructure, the Coast Guard cannot transform into a full-fledged military department, leaving the service perpetually unmoored and second-tier.

If the Coast Guard aims to rise and stay at the level of its fellow services, it doesn’t need less bureaucracy; it needs the right kind.

For the Coast Guard, this isn’t their first time having grappled with the question of who serves as the de facto secretary. Throughout its history, the service has bounced between departments — Treasury, Transportation, and today under Homeland Security — without ever gaining the singular stature of its military counterparts. By contrast, the Goldwater-Nichols Act and subsequent National Defense Authorization Acts have precisely governed the structure, civilian oversight, and executive functions of the other military departments.

The Coast Guard doesn’t need a bloated bureaucracy, but it does need a lean, functional secretariat to support a Coast Guard Secretary. The current leadership only recommends adding an undersecretary, but that realistically won’t be enough.

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The current military departments have four core Senate-confirmed assistant secretaries and a general counsel across each service. Given that the number of Coast Guard personnel and budget are a fraction of the Navy’s and about a quarter of the Marine Corps’, a leaner model should be used. Instead of assistant secretaries, deputy assistant secretaries for the mission support functions would appropriately instill civilian control, while balancing the Commandant’s management of the operations functions and districts.

Here’s what the structure should be with a small cadre of Deputy Assistant Secretaries (DASs) to oversee the most vital functions:

DAS for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics (AT&L):
Oversees the Coast Guard’s largest programs, including engineering & logistics C4IT, and acquisition. Ensures strategic alignment and accountability across major efforts, from the first icebreaker in almost 50 years  to big bets on emerging technology. Program Executive Officers (PEOs) to manage major acquisition programs are not enough because they are implementers, not strategists. Two necessary changes for independence would include transferring the acquisition approval authority from DHS Under Secretary for Management to Coast Guard Under Secretary and eliminating  the coordination requirement with the Navy by shuttering the Coast Guard-Navy Integrated Program Office for heavy icebreakers.

DAS for Manpower & Reserve Affairs (M&RA):
Leads all human resources functions, inclusive of recruitment, retention, and the Coast Guard Academy. Takes on hard personnel challenges like those raised in Operation Fouled Anchor to restore public trust while ensuring long-term workforce resilience.

DAS for Financial Management and Comptroller:
Owns budget strategy and represents Coast Guard equities within DHS and OMB negotiations. Helps restore credibility through a viable capital investment plan, which the service has failed to deliver in recent years.

DAS for Installations, Energy, and Environment (IE&E):
Manages the Coast Guard’s unique infrastructure portfolio from hurricane-prone Gulf ports to remote Pacific stations where environmental resilience is the lynchpin of mission readiness. Defends political tradeoffs, like gutting its infrastructure budget by 90 percent.

Deputy assistant secretaries, by rank and protocol, are nestled between one and two-star flag officers. This layer would enable the officers to be the stewards of the service, as is most healthy for an effective civil-military relations dynamic.

The Coast Guard, given its law enforcement capabilities and homeland security mission, still has an underdeveloped applicability of a civil-military paradigm. Setting this structure would be productive, particularly relieving the uniformed members of inherently political and often partisan fights on budget and policy decisions.

The Price Of Staying Hollow

Some may argue that creating a full secretariat constitutes too much bureaucratic growth in the current sentiment of cuts, particularly given DHS’s recent budget proposal. Disjointed procurement, talent attrition, and lack of strategic direction all stem from inadequate institutional scaffolding.

Between monitoring activities in the Arctic and partnering with allies’ coast guards in the Pacific, the Coast Guard is a front-line actor in great power competition. Yet, unlike its Pentagon counterparts, the Coast Guard lacks the senior political leaders to fight for funding, priorities, or innovation. Without this kind of civilian firepower, the Coast Guard will keep losing ground to better-resourced agencies across DHS — or to its cousins in DoD.

This paradox that an administration hellbent on trimming national security fat may finally be offering the Coast Guard what it has always lacked, real institutional muscle, is hard to ignore. But reform doesn’t always mean reduction. Sometimes, it means building smart, lean, and targeted capacity where it’s long overdue.

If the Trump Administration is serious about elevating the Coast Guard, as Force Design 2028 suggests, it must embrace this contradiction and finish the job.

Daniel E. White is a visiting fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason University. He previously served as the deputy assistant secretary of homeland security for strategy and policy planning from 2024 to 2025.