Editorial: The Coast Guard Spent $3.8 Million on a PDF

The Coast Guard’s new credentialing portal promises complete applications and faster processing. One American ship captain tested it. What he found raises serious questions about automation, accountability, and whether Washington understands the problem it’s trying to solve.

By an Anonymous U.S. Merchant Marine Captain

Last April, President Trump signed Executive Order 14269, Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance. It’s a serious commitment to rebuilding the U.S. Merchant Marine, and tucked into Section 13 is an order every American mariner should care about: identify unnecessary or burdensome credentialing requirements and eliminate them.

The White House understands something Washington has forgotten for decades. You can build all the ships you want, but without licensed mariners to sail them, they’re just expensive steel tied to a pier.

Military Sealift Command has already had to scale back operations because it cannot find enough qualified crews. Anyone who has sailed aboard an MSC vessel understands what it means when a ship cannot get underway for lack of people.

So when the Coast Guard launched NAVITA, its new merchant mariner credentialing portal, on September 14, there was good reason for optimism. As gCaptain reported in June, the Coast Guard tied the project directly to the executive order, and Rear Adm. Rob Compher said the goal was “to make it easier for mariners to get the credentials they need to work.”

That’s exactly the right goal.

For years, mariners have described the National Maritime Center in West Virginia as a bureaucratic black hole. This summer, more than 19,000 applications were reportedly sitting in the backlog, with processing times stretching eight to twelve months.

I hold a Master Unlimited license. I spent over a decade at sea on tankers, containerships and MSC vessels, and I’ve been through the Coast Guard’s credentialing process myself. So I logged in and tested NAVITA.

Here’s the short version. It doesn’t fix the problem.

NAVITA does not appear to solve the problem it was designed to fix.

What Is NAVITA?

The Coast Guard’s pitch is simple. NAVITA will speed things up by making sure every application is complete. It flags missing items as you go, it figures out your fees, and it connects to Pay.gov so you can pay on the spot.

That sounds great on paper. The trouble is it’s solving a problem mariners don’t have, because the problem was never that we forget to include documents. It’s that the arcane and byzantine rules by which the Coast Guard governs credentials are so confusing to so many mariners that the information in the documents is often wrong.  It’s paperwork that appears complete but contains information the Coast Guard will reject.

And NAVITA, at least in its first release, appears unable to distinguish between the two.

Why Do Applications Get Rejected?

Talk to any mariner who’s been through a renewal and you’ll hear the same thing.

Nobody forgets their physical. What trips people up is that the doctor has to initial and date every page, and a lot of doctors don’t know that, so the application comes back.

Nobody forgets their drug test either. But plenty of mariners walk into a clinic and take whatever test the clinic offers, a 7, 9 or 12 panel, when the Coast Guard will only take the DOT 5-panel. Never mind that the other tests screen for more drugs, not less.

Nobody forgets their sea service letters. What they don’t know to check is whether the tonnage on the letter matches what the National Vessel Documentation Center has on file, or whether the dates line up with the vessel’s records. Nobody tells you the evaluator is going to look.

And nobody forgets to pay. NAVITA even has a fee widget to help with that. In my testing it gave me the wrong number, and more often than not it wanted me to pay more than I owed.

So does NAVITA catch any of this?

The answer is NO.

It checks that a file is there. It doesn’t care what’s in it.

That’s an important distinction when the entire purpose of the system is supposed to be reducing application errors.

What Are “Optional Uploads”?

When I tested a renewal for a more complicated endorsement, NAVITA gave me a long list of “optional uploads.” Some had nothing to do with the application. Some were just wrong.

Think about what that means for a mariner at home between hitches. The Coast Guard’s own website tells them they might need more training, so they sign up, pay for it and burn their time off doing it, for a requirement that doesn’t exist.

Does NAVITA Actually Automate Anything?

Not really.

NAVITA doesn’t check the data you type in. I entered an address that isn’t in the USPS database, and it took it without a word. That’s how your new credential ends up in somebody else’s mailbox.

It doesn’t check your uploads either. It can’t tell if a scan is readable, if a page is missing or if you uploaded the wrong form. If the file ends in .pdf, it goes through.

And if the tech team can’t get the if/then logic right on a fee calculator, how are they going to handle the much harder automation the Coast Guard keeps promising in the next release?

I don’t have a clue.

What Did $3.8 Million Buy?

As gCaptain reported last September, the Coast Guard gave Stealth Solutions, a Salesforce consulting partner, a five-year deal worth up to $49.6 million to modernize credentialing. The first task order, $3.8 million, paid for the first release of NAVITA.

Here’s what that first release does. It takes your information and turns it into a PDF. That’s it. There’s no back end. People familiar with the system tell me staff are re-entering the information from Salesforce into the NMC’s old system so evaluators can review it the same way they always have. So that’s $3.8 million for a PDF, with $45.8 million still left on the contract.

The Coast Guard will tell you this is only the first release and the good stuff is coming. I’ve heard that one before. I shook my Magic 8 Ball on behalf of every mariner waiting in the queue, and it came up “Outlook not good.” And I have firends and family working for companies that use Saleforce. They tell me the company is famous for charging for additional unlocks. That might work for a large company raking in revenue but could cause an underfunded department like the NMC inside a budget anemic organization like the US Coast Guard to run into brick walls.

Who Tested It Before Launch?

From what I’ve been told, user testing was limited to a small group of service academy and union staff. A lot of them don’t work credentialing cases day to day, so they had no real way of knowing whether what NAVITA told them was right.

Industry wasn’t brought in at all. The mariners and operators whose paychecks depend on this system didn’t see it until launch day. My two Navy friends looking to enter the industry after a career spent at sea on warships say they are thouroughly confused by the process.

Why Does Everything Have to Be a PDF?

Uploads have to be PDFs. Not a photo, not a Word file. Just about every app on your phone can turn a picture into a PDF without you even noticing, but NAVITA can’t, because Salesforce doesn’t do that out of the box.

Who owns a scanner in 2026?

The Coast Guard will say paper is still an option. You can walk your application into a Regional Exam Center. There are 19 of them, 16 are open, and none of them are in the middle of the Pacific. And if you go looking for forms CG-719B and CG-719C on the NMC website, you’ll find the download links are gone. One friend who is caught in a doom loop was told he’ll need to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to get the contents of his file.

So how exactly are mariners supposed to use the paper option?

Why Salesforce?

Credentialing is one of the most complicated things the Coast Guard does. Endorsements, sea time, medical standards and training rules all depend on one another. And the Coast Guard picked Salesforce, an expensive platform built to track sales leads, to run it. Anything Salesforce doesn’t do out of the box has to be custom built in Apex, Salesforce’s own programming language, which looks a lot like Java.

Now the Coast Guard is locked in to one vendor, paying for every customization, and it still doesn’t have features you’d expect from any website in 2026, and they likely don’t have the budget to unlock the custom programing they need.

There are also rumors circulating that Apex solutions is outsourcing work to Southeast Asia. Could the FBI background checks and the records of veterans be exposed to foriegn agents? Probably not but this is they type of question that could easily be addressed by USCG representatives visiting the gCaptain forum or providing regular updates via YouTube or social media to assuage concerns.

What About Employers?

A lot of companies handle credentials for their crews. They have to. If a mariner’s credential lapses, that person can’t work, and the ship may not sail. NAVITA only lets a mariner name an individual as a third party, even though the OMB-approved CG-719B form lets employers, unions and others do it.

U.S.-flag operators crew the commercial fleet the Defense Department relies on for strategic sealift, so anything that hinders an employer from ensuring its crew is properly credentialed is a threat to strategic sealift. Employers can list jobs on the gCaptain job board but resumes have to be vetted and credentials checked before anyone is hired. NAVITA does not make that easy. And with so many US flagged ships doing critical national security jobs today, that’s a serious problem for our military.

Is This What Maritime Dominance Looks Like?

The executive order told the government to remove barriers for mariners. NAVITA adds new ones.

Here’s my prediction. NAVITA will shorten the line in one way, and it’s not the way anyone intended. Experienced mariners who’ve renewed their papers for decades will take one look at this thing, give up and retire.

A few years ago gCaptains founder Captain John Konrad wrote an editorial titled “Admiral, I Am NOT Ready For War.” His point then was that equipment doesn’t win wars, people do. That’s still true. We’re short of mariners right now, and every one we lose to a bad website is one fewer we’ll have when the country needs us.

Washington promised to restore American maritime dominance. It should start by making sure the people who sail American ships can actually get their credentials. This should be fixed FIRST, before shipbuilding, because you can build a hull in a few years but it takes over a decade to train a Captain.

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Editor’s note: This commentary is based on the firsthand testing and observations of a U.S. merchant marine captain who requested anonymity. Claims concerning internal Coast Guard workflows and prelaunch testing are attributed to information provided to the author and have not been independently established in this editorial.