In the wake of a Mexican naval vessel, a three-masted training ship, crashing into the Brooklyn Bridge and causing two deaths and nearly two-dozen injuries, Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-CA) alleged that the Elon Musk-led and Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency was responsible for the disaster. The Coast Guard quickly vindicated DOGE by shutting down Schumer’s claims.
As background, the ship involved was the training vessel Cuauhtémoc, a steel-hulled, three-masted barque named after the last Aztec emperor. It crashed into the Brooklyn Bridge, knocking the tops off its masts, when it lost power after leaving port and drifting in the wrong direction.
Sen. Schumer, instead of recognizing that the ship crashed because of its own faults, insisted that DOGE was causing dysfunction at the Coast Guard, which caused the crash. He began, as Fox News Digital reported, “We know that the Trump administration has been meddling in U.S. Coast Guard operations, from staffing to command and comms, and I have the general sense of a DOGE dysfunction in parts of the Coast Guard, to put it mildly.”
Continuing, he insinuated that the crash could have been prevented had DOGE not cut waste, saying, “After being fully briefed on last night’s Brooklyn Bridge accident, one thing is very clear. There are many more questions than answers as to how the accident occurred and whether it could have been prevented.”
He then suggested that the Coast Guard’s Vehicle Traffic System (VTS), which functions much like air traffic control, was down because of DOGE, saying, “There are indications that this service called the VTS may not have been fully or adequately functional in light of that hiring freeze. We don’t know the answer to that question. We need answers. If this were the case, Brooklyn Bridge accident could be a national harbinger, demanding immediate attention.”
Adding to that claim, Schumer insisted, “The current hiring freeze at the Department of Homeland Security, DHS, which the Coast Guard is part of, may have limited the ability of the Coast Guard to fully staff up at the VTS, the vehicle traffic service, the shore-wide system that provides quote air traffic control for the seas, especially in congested areas and restricted waters like New York Harbor.”
Speaking in a statement to Fox News Digital, the US Coast Guard shut down Sen. Schumer’s claim, saying that the system was fully functional and not the reason for the crash. Specifically, it said that VTS was “fully functional during the incident and operating in accordance with established procedures to manage commercial traffic and facilitate safe navigation.”
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Further, the Coast Guard noted that it was able to, alongside local first responders like the Fire Department of New York, respond to the crash and create a safe zone, insinuating that understaffing and resultant inabilities to deal with issues were not to blame. It said, “Our response included launching a crew from Station New York, establishing a temporary safety zone, and coordinating with NYPD, FDNY, and NYC DOT.”
Watch the crash here:
Featured image credit: By I, DavidShankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2301835