U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Kevin Lunday, Coast Guard acting commandant, speaks with Coast Guard Maritime Security Response Team-East members after a training exercise in Moyock, N.C., on Dec. 3, 2025. The Senate on Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025, confirmed Lunday to lead the sea service. He had been serving as acting commandant since January 2025. (Mason Svitenko/U.S. Coast Guard)
WASHINGTON — Adm. Kevin Lunday has been confirmed as the Coast Guard’s commandant after the service revised its guidance on hate symbols, prompting Senate Democrats to lift their holds on his nomination.
The Senate approved Lunday’s promotion on Thursday night following the deletion of language in the Coast Guard’s new workplace harassment policy that had recast swastikas and nooses from symbols of hatred to “potentially divisive.”
Previous policy had said the display of such imagery constituted “a potential hate incident.”
Media reporting on the change led Lunday in November to declare a prohibition on hate symbols but the policy manual went into effect Monday with the incendiary language that appeared to soften the Coast Guard’s policy on such symbols still in it.
Sens. Jacky Rosen, of Nevada, and Tammy Duckworth, of Illinois, blocked Lunday’s nomination this week in protest, accusing Lunday of backtracking on his commitment to combat antisemitism and hate crimes. They dropped their holds Thursday once the controversial language was stripped out.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Coast Guard in peacetime, has maintained that there “was never a ‘downgrade’” in policy language.
“The pages of superseded and outdated policy will be completely removed from the record so no press outlet, entity or elected official may misrepresent the Coast Guard to politicize their policies and lie about their position on divisive and hate symbols,” said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in a post on X.
Rosen said she continues to have reservations about the revision process and will block the nomination of Sean Plankey, now serving as a senior adviser to the secretary for the Coast Guard, until she sees that the new policy works to protect service members from racist and antisemitic harassment.
“Since the beginning of the process to implement changes to the U.S. Coast Guard’s policy manual, some in its leadership and at the Department of Homeland Security have been evasive, misleading and elusive,” Rosen said, adding that she has “worries about the ongoing implementation of this policy.”
Noem on Thursday called for the “politicized holdup” of Lunday’s nomination to end, saying he “has given nearly 39 years of distinguished service to the Coast Guard, this country, and the American people.”
Lunday had served as the acting commandant of the Coast Guard since the Trump administration in January fired former commandant Adm. Linda Fagan, the first female officer to lead a branch of the American armed forces.
He previously served as vice commandant of the Coast Guard from 2024 to 2025 and as commander of the Coast Guard Atlantic Area from 2022 to 2024.
