coast-guard

1. September 19, 2026News3 receipts5 min

   Forty-one percent of Coast Guard units sit in remote or vacation-rental areas where the housing allowance does not stretch, and the service went thirteen years without asking its own people about it.

   GAO published a three-page snapshot on September 18 pulling together its prior work on Coast Guard housing. Around 41 percent of Coast Guard units are in remote or high vacation rental areas with limited supply and high living costs relative to the allowance; 76 percent of Coast Guard members rely on private-sector housing, and 40 percent move to a new duty station every year. The Coast Guard has designated 46 critical housing areas affecting 400 of its 2,490 family housing units. It had not run a service-wide housing feedback survey since 2012 and launched one only in autumn 2025, after a GAO recommendation; GAO says it 'has yet to inform its housing policies with related current or complete information.' Nine GAO recommendations on military housing access were still open as of July 2026. This document makes no new recommendations and contains no agency response, because it is a synthesis rather than a new audit. DOD says it will publish a list of critical housing areas by May 2027.

   Also filed undergaomilitary-housinghomeland-securitydefense

2. September 19, 2026News3 receipts3 min

   Three years after the Coast Guard promised to fix how it handles sexual misconduct, 13 of its 49 reform actions are unfinished, it still cannot measure whether the rest work, and its reports to Congress keep arriving late.

   A two-page GAO report published September 18, required by the 2026 defense authorization act, says the Coast Guard reported completing 36 of the 49 actions in its plan to address sexual misconduct as of August 2026. GAO found no updated timelines or next steps for the other 13, no performance plan to tell whether the reforms are working, and annual reports to Congress for 2023, 2024 and 2025 that were late and still missing required information. The plan dates from November 2023, after it emerged that an internal investigation, Operation Fouled Anchor, had found the Coast Guard Academy mishandled more than 100 sexual assault allegations over 16 years and Congress had not been told. The report makes no new recommendations; it tracks ones GAO has already made. It does not include current incident counts.

   Also filed undergaosexual-misconductmilitaryoversightcongress

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