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Excerpts:

Late one night last August, Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, was at his summer residence two hours west of Helsinki when his phone rang. On the other end of the line was President Trump, calling with a request.

He wanted to buy a fleet of massive ships designed to cut through Arctic ice.

Mr. Trump had long fixated on these hulking vessels, known as polar icebreakers. He viewed them as crucial to dominating the Arctic, where rising temperatures have put key shipping lanes and vast mineral wealth up for grabs. And he was incensed that the United States possessed far fewer than Russia.

Two months later, Mr. Trump and Mr. Stubb were sitting in the Oval Office to announce a deal for 11 icebreakers, worth almost $7 billion, to be built by shipyards in both countries.

The arrangement was unusual in various ways.

The number was twice as many as the Coast Guard, which manages America’s fleet, had said it needed. The contracts for building the ships would be awarded without competitive bids. And while seven of the ships are expected to be built in the United States, the first four would be built in Finland, requiring Mr. Trump to waive a law prohibiting the construction of national security vessels overseas.

At that moment, though, none of that mattered. Mr. Trump wanted more icebreakers, and he wanted them from Finland.

The story behind Mr. Trump’s personal intervention in Coast Guard ships provides new insights into how his administration has cut corners and flouted rules in pursuit of projects that suit the president’s desires, regardless of whether they fit any broader strategic rationale.

The reliance on no-bid contracts, usually reserved for highly specialized or urgent needs, mirrors other recent Trump-driven projects — ranging in scale from renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to a $1.3 billion deal to build a migrant detention center.

Much of the funding is set to come from money set aside for border security in the Republicans’ spending law passed last year, the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which gave the administration wide latitude to pour billions into its priorities with little oversight.

To justify no-bid contracts for icebreakers, the Trump administration invoked a rarely used exemption claiming the awards are in the “public interest” — allowing the government to skip competition while saying little publicly about its rationale.

“We haven’t seen any information or analysis to justify the 11 or to assess the long-term affordability of these decisions,” said Shelby S. Oakley, director of contracting and national security acquisitions for the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office.


The Coast Guard, she said, risks ending up “like a lottery winner who spends all their money buying the mansion, and then goes broke once they realize they don’t have the money to maintain it.”

After his re-election, Mr. Trump again began trying to buy icebreakers. Coast Guard officials held meetings with U.S. shipbuilders to gauge their interest.

Finland’s reasons for courting Mr. Trump went beyond securing a deal for icebreakers, according to people familiar with the two countries’ interactions. Keeping a close relationship allows Mr. Stubb to try to persuade Mr. Trump of the importance of the NATO alliance and maintaining pressure on Russia.

The pressure worked. Last July, in the Republicans’ spending law, Congress provided $3.5 billion for the ships. But Mr. Trump and his advisers wanted to buy more icebreakers than $3.5 billion would pay for.

One shipbuilder had offered to build five icebreakers, based on a design originally developed for Russia; another proposal offered six ships, using a design for the Canadian Coast Guard.

“We ultimately didn’t want to have to choose between them,” Mr. Vought said.

In the end, they didn’t have to. “The One Big Beautiful Bill had given us an opportunity to do both,” he added.

The additional icebreaker money — another $3.5 billion — came from a separate fund in the bill intended for what lawmakers called “border support,” according to Troy Edgar, deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Coast Guard.

Experts say Mr. Trump’s actions reflect a very real problem: The United States needs more polar icebreakers.

The question, the experts say, is how many the United States really needs. Mr. Trump’s public comments suggest his interest reflects a frustration that other countries have more icebreakers, rather than any review of strategic requirements.

The administration’s goal is to obtain the first icebreakers before Mr. Trump leaves office. To meet that timeline, the Coast Guard bypassed the usual process of requesting and reviewing competing bids.

By using the public interest exemption, the provision that allowed the Trump administration to avoid seeking competitive offers, the Coast Guard did not have to prove that the work was urgent, or that only one company could do it. Instead, the agency simply needed to send Congress a letter informing lawmakers of the plan to award a no-bid contract before signing the deal.

The proposals accepted by the administration resulted in contracts with three companies.

To be politically defensible, the White House determined that the program should include at least one U.S. shipbuilder, according to people with knowledge of those discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations.

The Coast Guard turned to Bollinger Shipyards, a Louisiana-based shipbuilder with a history of government contracts, including an earlier deal for an icebreaker that has yet to be completed.

Bollinger’s C.E.O., Ben Bordelon, and his wife have donated about $1.7 million to Republican candidates and committees within the past decade, far outpacing what they gave to Democrats, federal elections data show.


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/climate/trump-arctic-ships.html