A U.S. Senate subcommittee has passed a bill that includes $1 billion to build a new polar icebreaker. Sen. Lisa Murkowski on Tuesday thanked the other members of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee for including the ship in its spending bill for next year.
“With the insertion that you have made, Mr. Chairman, and to the members of the committee, of a billion-dollar commitment to an icebreaker for the United States of America, an Arctic nation, this is going to be noted around the globe,” Murkowski said.
For years, Murkowski and other lawmakers put a few million dollars at a time in the annual Coast Guard budget toward a heavy icebreaker. The cost of a single icebreaker would exceed that agency’s entire yearly allotment for ship-building. The pending Senate bill would fund the whole project from a much larger pot: the Navy’s budget. It’s far from a done deal, though.
Even if the full Senate approves the bill, the House version doesn’t yet include the funding.
Liz Ruskin is the Washington, D.C., correspondent at Alaska Public Media. Reach her at lruskin@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Liz here.
