The Coast Guard Spent $0 of Its $15.4 Million Boating-Safety Budget in Fiscal 2025

Every gallon of gas burned by an outboard motor carries a federal excise tax, and that tax funds a specific promise: safer boating.▸ The money lands in the Sport Fish Restoration and Boating Trust Fund, gets transferred to the Coast Guard each fiscal year, and is supposed to move out again as state grants, safety education, and program administration. In fiscal 2025, one link in that chain didn't move at all.

The Coast Guard's own accounting puts the fiscal 2025 transfer from the Sport Fish Restoration and Boating Trust Fund at $140,057,689, authorized under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.▸ Before a cent reaches a state, the law carves the pool four ways: $7,983,288 — 5.7% — is automatically withheld under the Budget Control Act of 2011's sequestration rule; $15,407,567 is set aside for Coast Guard program administration; $6,195,859, a statutory 5% set-aside under 46 U.S.C. 13104(c), goes to national nonprofit boating-safety organizations; and $110,470,975 is the base amount attributable to the states.

States didn't stop at $110.5 million.▸ Once $7,250,352 in restored fiscal 2024 sequester funds and $6,057,344 in recovered or unused prior-year money were added back — dollars from outside this year's transfer — the final Total State RBS Distribution reached $123,778,671, split across 56 states and territories by a fixed formula: one-third divided equally, one third by each state's share of registered vessels, one-third by each state's prior-year boating-safety spending. The formula guarantees every jurisdiction at least a $736,778 equal share. In practice the range still runs from Florida's $10,606,007 — 1,004,745 registered boats, the most of any state — down to American Samoa's $765,980.

The $15,407,567 earmarked for Coast Guard program administration is where the story turns.▸ A Federal Register notice the Coast Guard is legally required to publish every year lays out, project by project, what that office actually spent in fiscal 2025 — and none of it was the money fiscal 2025 provided. "Of the $15.408 million made available to the Coast Guard in fiscal year 2025, $0 has been committed, obligated, or expended," the notice states. The office ran instead on $10,301,660 in leftover prior-year funds, spread across eleven line items: 16 government employees' salaries ($3,573,270) to coordinate the national program, a boat compliance inspection program ($2,553,042), the National Recreational Boating Survey ($1,500,000), contract research ($1,288,584), the accident database that every state and territory reports into ($518,244), three staff overseeing manufacturer compliance ($671,583), and the rest in travel, training, and overhead.

The agency's own explanation is a lag, not a scandal: "standard Federal contracting rules with associated lead and processing times" delay the gap between money becoming available and money going out the door.▸ But the backlog compounds. The notice puts the unspent remainder of the fiscal 2024 and 2025 administrative funds at roughly $22.065 million — money that can sit for up to three years before it must either fund a project or be withdrawn and folded into the state grant pool. A tax collected specifically to fund boating safety is, as a matter of routine, running one full fiscal year behind the year it was raised for.

None of that lag is illegal, and none of it is new — the statute itself gives the Coast Guard three years to spend each year's tranche.▸ But the program exists because boating kills people, and in the same fiscal window the money sat idle, the Coast Guard's 2024 casualty report counted 3,887 reportable accidents, 556 deaths, 2,170 injuries, and roughly $88 million in property damage — a fatality rate of 4.8 per 100,000 of the 11,674,073 recreational vessels registered nationwide.

Where the operator's training history was known, 69% of 2024's deaths happened on boats piloted by someone with no boating-safety instruction at all; only 19% happened where the operator held a nationally-approved safety certificate.▸ Where cause of death was known, 76% of victims drowned, and where life-jacket use was known, 87% of them weren't wearing one. This is exactly the population the trust fund's education dollars are supposed to reach — and enforcement on the water is thin by design: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' closest occupational category, Fish and Game Wardens, counts roughly 7,000 people nationally, a median annual wage of $74,060, and a job description that splits boating patrol against hunting and fishing enforcement. The federal office coordinating the entire $140-million-a-year system, meanwhile, is staffed by 16 people.

Funding figures cover federal fiscal year 2025 (October 2024–September 2025); casualty and registration figures cover calendar year 2024, the most recent full year the Coast Guard has published. The two calendars overlap but are not identical, so figures from each are not directly additive. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' "Fish and Game Wardens" category is the closest national occupational match to state boating-law enforcement, but it also covers hunting and general wildlife enforcement, not boating patrol alone.