As the White House proceeds full speed ahead on battleships that will bear President Donald Trump’s name, lawmakers want to know it won’t be a flop first.
The House draft of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2027, released last week, authorizes $1 billion for the prospective Trump-class battleship program. But the bill bars contracts from being granted until the Navy secretary can certify the ships’ technologies are “sufficiently mature.”
“It's rare to see the majority challenge the president on a major priority with language like this,” Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, told RS. The provision “means that there's strong bipartisan concern about rushing to production on the Trump-class battleship as the budget request envisions.”
Dan Grazier, who directs the Stimson Center’s National Security Reform program, told RS the provision is a positive move, given the recent history of failures in major Navy acquisition programs. “It should be common sense that, before we start building a [ship costing billions of dollars], let’s make sure that the design actually works before we fully commit,” he said.
Grazier said plans for the Trump-class ships resemble those of vessels that have underperformed because of the Navy’s misguided yet continued focus on making vessels with ambitious yet unproven technologies.
“They took all the worst [design] ideas that led to the Littoral Combat Ship…the Zumwalt-class destroyers, and the Constellation class, and [are] doubling down on it” with the Trump-class, Grazier said, listing some of those ships.
Slated to be three times the size of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, the Trump-class ships will have nuclear weapons-armed Sea-Launched Cruise Missiles (SLCMNs), hypersonic missiles, railguns, and lasers. But these weapons are still in development.
These planned capabilities “will make [the new vessels] prone to design flaws and maintenance issues,” Murphy explained. “And they only plan to build a handful of them. This runs directly counter to the Navy's stated goals of developing a more agile and distributed force.”
The administration has said the Trump-class battleship will be the “centerpiece” of the Navy’s new Golden Fleet initiative, announced in December. The vessels will be an expensive endeavor if they proceed; the first three Trump-class ships together are slated to cost $43.5 billion. The fleet’s lead ship, the USS Defiant, will cost more than $17 billion alone.
“Congress would be wise to go beyond simply pumping the brakes and move to zero out this wasteful vanity project,” Murphy said.