Trippe completed sea trials in 1911, and upon commissioning joined the destroyers and submarines assigned to the Atlantic Torpedo Fleet and began routine operations along the United States East Coast.

On 2 January 1913, she headed south once more for three months of tactical exercises and gunnery drills from Guantanamo Bay and in the Gulf of Guacanayabo.

After the completion of an extensive overhaul, Trippe conducted sea trials and drills in the Boston area from mid-August to late September 1914.

Trippe continued to operate off the U.S. coast until early May 1917, when she entered port at Boston and commenced preparations for duty overseas.

After a port call at St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada, she arrived at Queenstown on the southern coast of Ireland, the location of a major wartime American destroyer base.

Her area of operations, situated as it was in the war zone which Germany had established around the British Isles on 5 February 1915, was the prime hunting ground of German U-boats.

On 18 September 1917, she and the destroyer USS Jacob Jones were steaming in company in the Atlantic Ocean some 350 nautical miles (648 km; 403 mi) west of Brest, France, when, shortly after 02:00, she sighted the distinctive wake of the periscope of a submarine running on a parallel course, but in the opposite direction.

Trippe nonetheless successfully shepherded her convoy into Quiberon Bay on the coast of France, made repairs quickly, and resumed her routine.

[6] The force commander of British submarines, Captain Martin Dunbar-Nasmith, commended L2 and the destroyers for the action in his report on the friendly fire incident.

Admiral Lewis Bayly, the Royal Navy′s Commander-in-Chief, Coast of Ireland, in his endorsement of Nasmith′s report, wrote, "Had L-2 not been very skillfully and coolly handled, she would have been lost.

"[6] On 11 November 1918, the day of the signing of the armistice with Germany that brought World War I to an end, Trippe was in port at Queenstown.

The United States Coast Guard's small fleet, charged with stopping the illegal importation of alcoholic beverages, was unequal to the task.

Consequently, President Calvin Coolidge proposed increasing the Coast Guard's fleet by transferring 20 of the U.S. Navy's inactive destroyers, and the United States Congress authorized the necessary funds on 2 April 1924.

U.S. Coast Guardsmen and U.S. Navy shipyard workers overhauled Trippe's hull, stripped her of depth-charge gear and torpedo tubes, and removed one of her four guns.

After a month of gunnery exercises off St. Petersburg, Florida, she returned to Stapleton on 23 April 1930 to resume operations along the U.S. coast.