U.S. Coast Guard careers

The Coast Guard dates to 1790, when Congress authorized ten revenue cutters at Alexander Hamilton's urging to stop smugglers from draining tariff revenue; the service's historians still credit him as its father. The modern service took shape in 1915, when the Revenue Cutter Service merged with the U.S. Life-Saving Service, and the Lighthouse Service folded in during 1939. That lineage explains the unusual mix of work inside one service: maritime law enforcement, lifesaving, and aids to navigation each grew up as separate organizations before they became a single Coast Guard.