America’s naval shipyards are struggling to keep up with a combination of practical and political demands, and taxpayers are paying the price. New estimates from the GAO and CBO put the price tag in the billions.
We first flagged this after an August GAO report found that over the past decade, taxpayers paid roughly $4.17 billion for the Navy’s submarines to sit idle or wait through maintenance delays. These submarines had no active missions and played no operational role in protecting our country. Instead, they waited in lengthy queues for maintenance or decommissioning at our country’s public shipyards.
In total, these submarines accumulated 18,687 days of idle time or maintenance delays over the past ten years. That comes out to about $223,000 in taxpayer funds wasted every single day. Unless changes are made, GAO predicted that these costs will accelerate, wasting an additional $3.1 billion for more than 14,000 idle days over just the next five years.
One particularly illustrative case of this waste is the USS Pasadena, a submarine that officially entered inactive idle status in January 2025. Its dive certification expired, meaning it cannot conduct normal operations, but it is not scheduled to enter the Norfolk Naval Shipyard for decommissioning until November 2028. In the meantime, it remains fully crewed, waiting for a dry dock slot where its nuclear reactor can be defueled. That wait alone is expected to cost taxpayers over $300 million.
The most obvious explanation for this idle time is a lack of operational capacity at the nation’s four public naval shipyards: Norfolk, Pearl Harbor, Portsmouth, and Puget Sound. Much of the infrastructure at these public shipyards was originally built during World War II or earlier. That aging infrastructure simply cannot keep up with the Navy’s maintenance and decommissioning demands in a timely manner. GAO found that the four public shipyards complete submarine maintenance on schedule only 11% of the time. That delay is costing taxpayers a fortune.
The Administration seems to recognize the capacity issue. In August, a presidential memorandum directed the Navy to develop a plan to construct a fifth public shipyard. This builds upon a large-scale effort that started in 2018 called the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program (SIOP). The Navy initially estimated that SIOP would cost at least $21 billion over 20 years. Now a new GAO report estimates that carrying out the Navy’s current plans will cost more than $200 billion, and could take another 50 years or more to complete.
That new report also found that Congress still lacks a clear, consolidated picture of SIOP’s costs and risks. Unlike major defense acquisition projects, SIOP is not subject to standardized annual congressional cost and performance reporting. Without that information, Congress could be making multibillion-dollar funding decisions without a full picture of what has been spent, what remains to be funded, or what risks could drive costs even higher.
But SIOP and the public capacity issues do not tell the full story behind submarine idle time. In August, GAO found that the Navy has not fully evaluated alternative decommissioning strategies, such as defueling outside dry docks and reduced crewing. Either of these strategies could significantly reduce the billions of dollars in expected waste over the next few years.
In the midst of this idling crisis, the Administration is also pursuing projects that could strain capacity in the nation’s private shipyards. At Newport News, the largest private shipyard in the United States, those projects include a potential mid-production redesign of aircraft carriers, and building the proposed Trump-class battleship.
In August, the Administration directed the Navy to develop a plan to replace the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) and advanced weapons elevators on the latest Ford-class aircraft carrier with steam and hydraulic systems. Steam and hydraulic systems have not been in production since the last Nimitz-class carrier was commissioned in 2009. In their place, aircraft carriers have been using electromagnetic systems, which are more effective, more reliable, and most importantly for taxpayers, more cost-effective. A naval test this year reaffirmed the Navy’s preference for them.
Replacing EMALS with steam would require a major rework of the Ford-class carriers, as their design does not currently incorporate the massive equipment required for a steam system. Replacing affordable, state-of-the-art technology with a less effective, more expensive system doesn’t make much sense, particularly in light of the Navy’s other shipbuilding issues.
Advancing this redesign for ships already under construction would compound the cost to taxpayers and naval readiness. The White House directive calls for a plan to make steam great again on the USS Doris Miller, a carrier already midway through its construction process. Regardless of the merits of steam (or lack thereof), such a significant change after construction is already underway would add a large additional cost and further delay the commissioning of a ship that is already two years behind schedule. General Atomics, the company tasked with building electromagnetic catapult systems, stated that “changing course now would introduce significant cost, schedule, and integration risks.” Taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for this steam dream.
The proposed Trump-class battleship threatens to exacerbate this shipbuilding crisis—adding unnecessary costs and putting additional strain on an already overtaxed system. Firstly, the Trump-class is antithetical to everything the Navy says it wants: a more agile and distributed naval force. But beyond the strategic concerns, the costs and potential delays are hard to ignore. Moreover, final assembly of the battleships would take place at Newport News’ Dock 12, the exact same dock at the exact same shipyard currently used to construct the Ford-class aircraft carriers like the USS Doris Miller.
Newport News is already behind schedule on the construction of three aircraft carriers and numerous submarines. Adding the construction of the Trump-class battleship to its workload could further delay those projects. That’s partly because the Administration is rushing to begin production before the ship’s designs are complete. According to a March GAO report, that practice means the Navy’s shipbuilding programs and their shipyards are “made to operate in a perpetual state of triage.” Given current delays in virtually every shipbuilding program, adding a massive new project with major strategic shortcomings is ill-advised, to say the least.
The costs are equally worrisome. An August report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that a fleet of 15 Trump-class battleships would cost about $275 billion, including $23 billion for the first ship.
Before taxpayers are asked to spend billions to expand shipyard capacity, the Navy should make better use of the capacity it already has. That means evaluating new strategies to overcome the submarine backlog. It means avoiding costly redesigns after construction begins. And it means rejecting another massive, unnecessary shipbuilding program that would put further stress on an already strained system.
