Methodology & source manifest
Everything on the Coast Guard monitor derives from public records — the Department's own Budget-in-Brief and the USAspending API. This page is the audit trail: method, sources, validation, and every flag. Nothing is invented, estimated, or hidden.
Method
The budget spine is hand-keyed from the U.S. Coast Guard chapter of the DHS Budget-in-Brief across four fiscal columns — FY2024 enacted (from the FY2026 BIB), FY2025 full-year CR, FY2026 annualized CR, and the FY2027 President's Budget request (all three from the FY2027 BIB). At build time, every subtotal the Department prints — Net Discretionary, Gross Discretionary, Total Mandatory/Fees, and Total Budget Authority — is independently re-summed from its component appropriation lines, for all four columns, and asserted to the dollar; any mismatch halts the build. The live layer reads obligations and contract awards from the USAspending API with the Coast Guard as the awarding sub-agency under DHS.
0 build-time flag(s) across all layers — each surfaced below, never silently dropped.
Discretionary vs. mandatory
The Coast Guard's discretionary base is Operations & Support, Procurement, Construction & Improvements, Research & Development, and the Medicare-Eligible Retiree Health Care Fund Contribution (the “Net Discretionary” subtotal), plus the Housing Fund (“Gross Discretionary”). The standing mandatory and fee accounts — Retired Pay, Boating Safety, the Maritime Oil Spill Program, and Funds — are reported in a separate frame and never folded into the discretionary headline. Separately, reconciliation shipbuilding (the Working Families Tax Cut Act / PL 119-21, funding the Polar and Arctic Security Cutters) is referenced in the Budget-in-Brief as additive to the discretionary base but is not a line item in the Coast Guard component table — so it is flagged, not quantified, and never conflated with base discretionary.
Operate vs. acquire — and the CR years
Alone among DHS components, the Coast Guard carries military-style appropriations: an operating account (Operations & Support, including military pay) and an acquisition account (Procurement, Construction & Improvements — major cutters, aircraft, and shore facilities), with Research & Development the third, acquisition-side account. The monitor surfaces this operate-versus-acquire split explicitly. Note that FY2026 is an annualized full-year Continuing Resolution carried at FY2025 levels — the Budget-in-Brief prints FY2026 amounts identical to FY2025, and this monitor preserves that faithfully rather than treating it as new enacted detail.
Source documents & validation ledger
Layer 1 — money spine (DHS Budget-in-Brief, Coast Guard chapter)
extract not present at build time
Layer 3 — live obligations & contracts (USAspending, Coast Guard sub-agency)
extract not present at build time
The FY2024 enacted column is drawn from the FY2026 Budget-in-Brief's “FY 2024 Enacted” column; the FY2024 Research & Development figure cross-checks against the FY2024 Joint Explanatory Statement (“as requested”). PPA-level enacted detail for Operations & Support and Procurement, Construction & Improvements is stated in the explanatory statement only as deltas from the request, so this monitor reports their enacted totals from the publisher-clean Budget-in-Brief column — a deferred enhancement is full PPA-level enacted reconstruction from the appropriations act.