The Questionable Case of Kristi Noem's $50 Million Luxury Jet
Kristi Noem, President Donald Trump's secretary of Homeland Security, came under fire last week for her department's eleventh-hour request for a new luxury jet: $50 million for a Gulfstream 5 for Noem's personal use, paid for out of the budget of the Coast Guard.
The Department of Homeland Security responded to the denunciations with a stirring defense. 'The current CG-101 G550 is over twenty years old, outside of Gulfstream's service life, and well beyond operational usage hours for a corporate aircraft. This is a matter of safety,' DHS assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin told The Intercept. 'Much like the Coast Guard's ships that are well beyond their service life and safe operational usage, Coast Guard's aircraft are too.'
Experts say that McLaughlin is right. The Coast Guard — which is a part the Department of Homeland Security — needs new ships and planes. But the proposed budget already earmarked more than $500 million to upgrade the service's aging air fleet. Experts and members of Congress are left questioning why DHS would prioritize buying a luxury plane for a Cabinet secretary seemingly obsessed with traveling far and wide for photo ops, from New York City to El Salvador, over the aircraft needed for core Coast Guard duties.
'The Secretary's plane isn't the only Coast Guard asset operating past its prime, and yet hers is the Department's number one priority for replacement,' Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told The Intercept, after blasting Noem's desire for a 'tricked out' new plane for her 'personal national photo op tour.' He added, 'A Trump Cabinet official putting themselves before the people they serve is par for the course.'
DHS failed to reply to a request for information about when and how the decision was made to replace the jet, who was behind the decision, and why the Gulfstream 5 was chosen
'On its face, there's nothing wrong with DHS buying a replacement for a 20-year-old plane per se, and it makes sense to fund replacements like this through the Coast Guard because they know how to buy planes. But this last-minute spending shift raises questions,' said Steve Ellis, president of the nonpartisan budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense and a former Coast Guard officer. 'Was this a planned replacement for an aircraft at the end of its lifecycle, or was this a top-down decision to get Secretary Noem a fancy new jet ahead of schedule? The Coast Guard has a lot of aging equipment and money spent on an executive jet isn't available for other asset needs. It's a question of priorities.'
The Coast Guard's 50,000 active-duty and auxiliary personnel are currently without a commandant after Adm. Linda L. Fagan, the first female commandant of the service, was fired by the Trump administration earlier this year.
A hiring freeze at DHS has exacerbated long-standing staffing issues at the Coast Guard. A 2024 Government Accountability Office report found, for example, that close to 10 percent of its authorized military aviation workforce positions were vacant as of July 2023. Last month, a group of senators requested that Noem and others prioritize funding of the Coast Guard's recruitment and retention initiatives to make up a 3,000-person deficiency in enlisted personnel.
'In 2023, because of this personnel shortage, the Coast Guard experienced unpredictable interruptions in vital operations involving essential search and rescue and law enforcement missions,' they wrote. 'In 2024, the service was forced to make temporary, undesirable nation-wide changes to its operational posture to prevent the continued decline of its operational capacity and to ensure the safety and security of our constituents in the maritime domain.'
DHS failed to supply data on just how many Coast Guard ships and planes are — as McLaughlin said — 'well beyond their service life and safe operational usage.' But last year's GAO report found that the Coast Guard's aircraft generally did not meet the service's 71 percent availability target from 2018 through 2022. The Coast Guard had, as of January 2024, four programs underway to modernize its aircraft, at an estimated cost of $105.6 billion, according to GAO.
The Coast Guard also has 259 cutters and around 1,600 smaller boats, according to the service's website.
Questioned by the House Appropriations Committee last week, the Coast Guard's acting commandant, Adm. Kevin Lunday, sidestepped questions about whether he was contacted by Noem or other Trump administration officials concerning the jet. Lunday did insist the Gulfstream 5 had legitimate uses and likened the current CG-101 G550 to the rest of the service's aging planes and ships.
'Like a lot of the rest of our operational aviation fleet and our cutters and our boats and our shore facilities, it's old, and it's approaching obsolescence and the end of its service life,' he testified. 'We're continually hampered by pressure for sustaining and operating our assets, our boats and our ships … we're not able to maintain them at the rate we need to, and so they're not always as available as we need them to be when a mission demand occurs or an operational case is detected.'
The proposed budget — actually a reconciliation bill, formally titled 'The One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act' — allocates the bulk of new Coast Guard spending into acquiring new icebreaker ships.
The U.S. currently has one heavy icebreaker called the Polar Star, which was built in the 1970s; a medium icebreaker, the Healy; and a light icebreaker, the Storis.
Roger Wicker, the Republican senator from Mississippi who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been pushing to expand the icebreaker fleet for years, writing in 2022 that 'the moment demands that we unleash the full might of our defense industrial base to secure our foothold in the arctic.'
Trump has promised an entire fleet of icebreakers. 'We're going to order about 40 Coast Guard big icebreakers. Big ones. And all of a sudden, Canada wants a piece of the deal. I say, 'Why are we doing that?' I mean, I like doing that if they're a state, but I don't like doing that if they're a nation,' Trump said in a speech in North Carolina on January 24. In March, Trump upped the number, saying the U.S. was 'in the process of ordering 48 icebreakers,' again followed by a reference to Canada becoming a state.
DHS only recently approved construction of one new polar security cutter for the U.S. Coast Guard, to be built by Bollinger Shipyards in Pascagoula, Mississippi. It will be the first heavy polar icebreaker to be built in the U.S. in about 50 years.
'The U.S. icebreaker fleet is in sad shape. It's a critical program that U.S. shipbuilders have struggled with,' said Taxpayers for Common Sense's Ellis. 'The Coast Guard should be looking at all options, including cost-effective acquisition of heavy icebreakers from the world's leading icebreaker builder: Finland.'
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