Trump tax bill supercharges Coast Guard's Arctic icebreaker fleet

USA Today

10-07-2025

On Thursday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: USA TODAY National Correspondent Trevor Hughes breaks down a part of the recent tax bill that adds new ships to the Coast Guard's fleet in the Northwest Passage, and the broader context in that region amid an ongoing cold war with China. President Donald Trump announces new tariffs - for copper, Brazil and more. Death tolls rise in the flooding disasters in Texas and New Mexico. Measles was eradicated in the United States 25 years ago. Cases this year have reached a new high. Tennessean Education Reporter Rachel Wegner looks at some of the ongoing divisions in American education 100 years after the Scopes trial.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Thursday, July 10th, 2025. This is USA TODAY's The Excerpt.
Today, how the recent tax bill sends new ships to patrol near the Arctic. Whilst we break down some of this week's tariff news. And a century after the Scopes trial, Americans are still divided over what kids should learn.
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The tax bill recently signed by President Donald Trump will send a new fleet of icebreaker ships into the edge of the melting Arctic. I spoke with USA TODAY National Correspondent Trevor Hughes to learn more. Trevor, thanks for hopping on.
Trevor Hughes:
Hey, good to be here.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. So, Trevor, what's in this tax bill as it pertains to the Coast Guard's Arctic icebreaker fleet?
Trevor Hughes:
Well, the Coast Guard has been saying for years it needs more icebreakers and more ships that can operate in icy waters, and Congress and President Trump have delivered. I mean, this bill contains money for dozens of new ships, icebreakers, cutters that are equipped for icy water work. This is a pretty significant expansion of the Coast Guard fleet.
Taylor Wilson:
And I guess it's fair to say that climate change has really helped make this happen, Trevor, right?
Trevor Hughes:
Yeah. I mean, help, it's maybe not the right word to use here, but yeah, that's what's driving this. Climate change is opening up the ice between Alaska and Greenland, and that's known as the Northwest Passage. It's a fabled passage that explorers searched for years. And it's only open some years and only for brief times, and rarely do normal ships go through it, but as climate change melts that ice, more and more ships are going to start using it.
It saves something like 40% of the distance from Asia to Europe as opposed to going through the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal. But of course, what that means is more ships mean more Coast Guard patrols, and right now, we just don't have enough ships to patrol that area.
Taylor Wilson:
Really, what's the broader context here, Trevor, in terms of this ongoing cold war between the US and China and evergreen tensions with Russia in this region as well?
Trevor Hughes:
That's the thing, right? China has been looking at this area for expansion. I saw something the other day that China referred to itself as a near-Arctic nation, although it is not. But Russia has a strong connection with China, and of course, is heart of the Arctic.
What's happening is that the United States is trying to make sure it's protecting its territory and perhaps protecting the shipping, and also the interests in oil and gas and maybe rare earth minerals that could be in northern Alaska, in Canada, and in Greenland. You may recall President Trump has really identified Greenland as something he wants to be paying very close attention to, and this new Coast Guard icebreaker and cutter allocation will probably help with patrolling that area.
Taylor Wilson:
Trevor, what do we hear from Native people in this part of North America about all this?
Trevor Hughes:
I have reported from the coast of the Bering Sea a number of times over the years, and one of the things that the Native folks have talked a lot about is this concern that as more and more ships, big tanker ships, cargo ships are going through this very, very remote area, that if there's a problem, if they run aground, if they have a fire, God forbid something like that happens, that there won't be anyone to help those shippers.
But then there's also these environmental catastrophes that could happen in this otherwise pristine wilderness area. We all remember the Exxon Valdez spill and the Native people who live along the Bering Sea, who really depend on the fish and wildlife for subsistence, they have serious concerns about what environmental consequences might come from extra shipping.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. So, what's the timeline for all this? What's next and when will the new icebreakers functionally arrive?
Trevor Hughes:
Building ships takes a long time and the United States doesn't, frankly, have a lot of shipbuilding capacity. That's actually a big thing the Trump administration has been focusing on. So, it's going to take years before we see any of these actual new ships on the water.
That being said, we, the country, recently purchased a used ship that was used for servicing oil rigs and we are repurposing that and going to be deploying that out of Juneau, Alaska, later this summer.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Trevor Hughes is a national correspondent with USA TODAY. Thanks as always, Trevor.
Trevor Hughes:
You bet.
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Taylor Wilson:
President Donald Trump has announced a new 50% tariff on US copper imports overall, and a 50% duty on goods from Brazil, both to start on August 1st. Trump has also notified an additional seven countries they will be hit with tariffs of at least 20% or more on August 1st, in a series of letters to foreign leaders. In separate letters to each targeted country he said he would impose 30% tariff rates on imports from Libya, Sri Lanka, Iraq, and Algeria, and he said other nations would be hit with 25 or 20% tariffs. That came after a number of other new tariff rates earlier in the week for different countries.
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Hopes were dwindling yesterday for finding some of the more than 170 people still missing after last week's flooding in Texas. The death toll has climbed steadily in recent days, now up to 119 as of this morning, at least 27 of those were children and counselors at a girls' summer camp.
Elsewhere in the country, the New Mexico resort town of Ruidoso was hit by severe flash flooding on Tuesday as slow moving storms pounded areas still reeling from burn scars left by wildfires last year. At least three people have been confirmed dead in that flooding.
For the first time since measles was declared eradicated in the U.S. in 2000, domestic cases have reached a peak, topping 1,288 cases as of yesterday, according to the CDC. There have been three confirmed deaths and the vast majority of hospitalizations have been seen in unvaccinated people and children. Measles is a vaccine-preventable disease that had been considered eradicated in the country as of 2000, meaning there was no spread and new cases were those contracted only from abroad. But vaccinations have declined, resulting in a growing number of states no longer reporting rates consistent with herd immunity, and infections have returned. The last outbreak of a similar scale came in 2019 when more than 1,200 cases were confirmed across the country. Just six months into this year, that number has been surpassed in a grim milestone. You can read more with the link in today's show notes.
It's been a century since an American teacher's fight to educate his high school students about evolution brought a small town controversy into the national spotlight, and 100 years later, Americans are still divided over what kids should learn. I spoke with Tennesseean children's reporter Rachel Wegner, for more. Thanks for joining me, Rachel.
Rachel Wegner:
It's good to be with you.
Taylor Wilson:
So, let's just go back, what, about a century here? Remind us, what was the Scopes Monkey Trial?
Rachel Wegner:
It took place in 1925, in a small town called Dayton, Tennessee. It debated the topic of can evolution be taught in schools? At that time, Tennessee had a law that explicitly banned the teaching evolution and said instead, you should be teaching creationism as told in the Bible.
Taylor Wilson:
Fast forward to this era that we're in now, Rachel. How has the debate over teaching about race shaken out in recent years?
Rachel Wegner:
So, as lots of people probably remember, there were widespread protests gripping the nation, even happening internationally after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, at the hands of police. It was a time where it seemed like everyone was on board to just start talking about equity and discrimination and racism, and to try to understand and learn more about what was happening.
But within a year there was pushback that was happening against how race was taught in schools, and some people might remember the term critical race theory being thrown around. And concerns now have broadened more widely among the Republican Party and even President Trump, where they're pushing back against diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and even threatening to cut federal funding for schools that teach it.
The difficult thing about that for a lot of schools is there's not a very clear definition on what DEI is or what critical race theory is, but there is now immense pressure to remove that from curriculums, from even school policies or programs, extending out even to higher education with some high-profile cases with Harvard and others now.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, you also bring up another controversial point in this piece, which is which schools should get taxpayer money? Interesting question. What are some of the recent developments you've been following here?
Rachel Wegner:
Here in Tennessee, that conversation is centered around school vouchers, which is essentially taxpayer-funded vouchers that families can use toward private school. And Tennessee just this year expanded its program to include about 20,000 people that can get these.
And then also the national scale, I've seen a lot of discussion around a Supreme Court ruling that even though it was a tied vote, it struck down a bid for a religious public charter school in Oklahoma. And that was another big question of public charter schools get public money, but can this Catholic charter school agency open one and still receive those funds?
So, a lot of the debates around taxpayer money going into either private or religious education have been, for sure, some of the biggest topics of conversation in recent years.
Taylor Wilson:
Rachel, as for queer and transgender issues in and around the classroom. What have you seen on this front?
Rachel Wegner:
So, a lot of those issues touch lots of the things we talked about already, right? One of the more prominent debates was around Florida's, quote, "Don't Say Gay" bill that was passed in its Republican-controlled legislature. And Governor Ron DeSantis signed it into law. And essentially, what that did is it prohibited teaching on topics that dealt with sexual orientation and gender identity in the early grade school years, K through three, and then later on Florida actually expanded that all the way through the 12th grade.
And I'd say that similar debates have played out nationwide. There's definitely been a lot of pushback from advocates for the LGBTQ community, along with an increasing number of red states, especially, passing laws against it.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, we talked about the Scopes trial at the top. We're speaking 100 years after that case. Why does the Scopes trial still matter today, Rachel?
Rachel Wegner:
Something that's so interesting about the Scopes trial is a lot of researchers and experts pointed to the first real instance of the culture wars that are still going on today.
It's a sign of how education and schools often land in the very center of the most important debates that we have in the U.S. today. And it touches everything from religion to race to gender, to how we run our schools, how they're funded. And I think that some of the themes and issues that emerged from the Scopes trial are even still relevant today about the separation of church and state, about how we teach really core concepts, like, where did humanity come from? Why are we here? And it's fascinating to take a look back in that little time ball 100 years ago and see how much of that is still happening today, just in different forms.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Folks can find a full version of the story in today's show notes. Rachel Wegner covers children's issues for the Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. Thank you for the insight here, Rachel.
Rachel Wegner:
Thanks for having me on.
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Taylor Wilson:
And later today, in the wake of the deadly Texas floods, young people may be experiencing a surge in feelings of existential dread. While how youth respond to the reality of global warming differs from person to person, experts say that acknowledging their emotional pain in the first place is critical.
Caroline Hickman:
I'm going to quote a 10-year-old, this is a number of years ago, and I thought I understood, but he said to me, "Caroline, you don't fully understand." He said, "You grew up thinking polar bears would be there forever." He said, "I am growing up knowing they will go extinct."
Taylor Wilson:
That was Climate Psychologist Caroline Hickman, a specialist who has been counseling youth on how to deal with eco-anxiety for decades. Tune in today, beginning at 4:00 P.M. Eastern Time, to hear her eye-opening conversation with my colleague, Dana Taylor.
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And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio, and as always, you can email us at [e-mail]. I'm Taylor Wilson and I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.