The Levin Letter: The USS Lincoln Is Coming Home: We Still Need Answers
I spoke with a mom in our district a couple months ago about her daughter aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. She was troubled by the conditions, the food going bad, the broken plumbing, the long shifts with no end in sight. But that was not what bothered her most. It was that nobody could tell her what her daughter’s mission was, how long she would be there, or what would have to happen for her to come home.
She was not asking me to bring her daughter back. She was asking what the mission was. Nine months into an open-ended deployment in an active war, the United States government owed that mother an answer, and it did not have one.
The Lincoln left San Diego in November 2025 for a routine patrol in the Indo-Pacific with 5,000 servicemembers aboard, including many from Camp Pendleton. What they could not have anticipated was the war they would be pulled into, or how long they would be asked to stay.
When the war in Iran began in February 2026, the Lincoln was redirected to the Middle East. With too few carriers available to rotate into the region, no replacement was ever ready to relieve it. Earlier Iranian strikes on logistics facilities in Bahrain disrupted deliveries of fresh food, basic toiletries and mail. The ship operated continuously in an active combat zone for nine months while its crew was denied the standard breaks and port stops that allow sailors to rest and recover.
Servicemembers worked 12- to 16-hour shifts, often without breaks. They told their families about nearly rotten meals, water contamination concerns, broken plumbing and other conditions no one should be asked to endure. The psychological distress grew severe enough that some crew members reportedly attempted to take their own lives.
Let me be clear that our Marines and Sailors aboard the Lincoln are the best of the best. Nobody who volunteers for a carrier deployment expects comfort, and none of them asked for sympathy. The job includes long hours, cramped quarters, months away from the people they love and danger that never fully switches off. Over nine months in a combat zone, they performed at a level their country should be proud of.
But what happened to them went far beyond the ordinary hardship of service. Two port calls in nine months. Deliveries that stopped coming. A relief plan that did not exist. That was a failure of planning by the people who sent them. Asking Americans in uniform to be tough is fair. Asking them to absorb this administration’s mistakes is not.
I took the concerns of families directly to Navy and Defense Department leadership, leading the San Diego delegation in writing to Secretary Hegseth and Acting Secretary Cao, demanding answers about conditions aboard and about the operational failures that allowed them to persist. Why weren’t the unsanitary conditions addressed immediately? Why didn’t the crew receive adequate mental health support? Why did the Navy not communicate any of this to families early and often? My colleagues and I also requested an independent Inspector General review of the deployment. And we demanded that the Lincoln be relieved and brought home.
The response from the administration was to insist nothing was wrong. When families first raised the alarm in April, Secretary Hegseth called it fake news. Officials disputed reports about conditions, defended the extended deployment and brushed past what families were saying about the ship their own children were living on.
In early August, Acting Secretary Cao finally did sit down with families in San Diego. Roughly 200 of them filled a room and said plainly what they had been hearing from the ship. When they asked the most basic question, when their family members would be coming home, he could not answer it. Only after sustained public scrutiny and pressure from families and lawmakers was the Lincoln finally relieved. After more than nine months at sea, its Marines and Sailors are making their way back to San Diego and are expected in the coming weeks.
That Inspector General review still matters, and I intend to see it through. The country deserves to know how a carrier stayed at sea for nine months with no relief plan and no clear objective.
Because the deeper failure here was never only logistical. The administration sent 5,000 Americans into a war Congress never authorized and could not articulate what those Americans were being asked to accomplish. Open-ended deployments without defined missions exhaust a force, and they corrode the trust of the families who lend this country their sons and daughters. Congress bears responsibility, too. Too many of my colleagues have abandoned the Constitutional duty of authorizing and defining the military commitments servicemembers are asked to carry out.
The practical obligations are just as real. Crews on extraordinarily long deployments need supplies, rotation plans and mental health support built in from the start rather than improvised under pressure. Yet, federal funding for military medical research has dwindled while mental health and addiction programs serving servicemembers have been cut nationwide. I have voted consistently to reverse that, including in the most recent military budget bill, and it still falls far short.
Above all, when Marines and Sailors tell us something is wrong, the starting assumption has to be that they are telling the truth.
I am relieved the Lincoln is coming home. Our responsibility to that crew does not end when they arrive, and neither does our responsibility to the mom who called me, or to every family member in this district who deserves a straight answer about what we are asking of their loved ones.
By: Rep. Mike Levin
Source: Picket Fence Media