US Navy Shipbuilding Called Too Slow and Costly as Trump Vows Change

(Bloomberg) —

The US Navy keeps falling short in shipbuilding, with costs too high and deliveries too slow, the service’s acting acquisition chief said in written testimony submitted for a House hearing on Tuesday.

“Deliveries are approximately one to four years late and costs continue to rise faster than overall inflation,” Brett Seidle said in the prepared remarks to the House Armed Services seapower panel. “These challenges are shared across the nuclear and conventional shipbuilding communities with both Navy and Industry sharing responsibility.”

The comments underscored the challenges facing a new National Security Council maritime office that President Donald Trump has said he’s creating to revitalize both military and commercial shipbuilding in the US.

“We used to make so many ships. We don’t make them any more very much, but we’re going to make them very fast, very soon,” Trump said in his address to Congress last week. “It will have a huge impact.”

Navy Shipbuilding Crisis: GAO Finds Billions Spent Without Strategy as Fleet Goals Remain Unmet

In Seidle’s statement to the lawmakers the veteran Pentagon civilian official said that “US shipbuilders continue to produce the highest-quality, safest and most advanced warships in the world.” 

But he ticked off challenges, from the “atrophy of our manufacturing industrial base” to “supply chain disruptions” and “inconsistent industry investment across the shipbuilding industrial base.”

Shelby Oakley, acquisition director for the Government Accountability Office, said in her prepared testimony that “without a thorough retooling of its processes, the Navy is likely to continue creating conditions where overall fleet capability falls short of expectations and needs.” 

Despite about $6 billion in investments by the Navy and Defense Department from 2014 though 2023 “to improve the industrial base, they have yet to fully assess whether” the dollars are “having the intended effect,” she said. The Navy and Pentagon plan to spend an additional $12 billion for that purpose by 2028.

China’s navy — supported by the world’s largest shipbuilding industry, which produces more than half of merchant ships globally — is rapidly growing and now has a larger fleet than the US.

Congressional Research Service naval analyst Ronald O’Rourke, who has followed the issue for 41 years, called cost increases in US Navy shipbuilding “significant and chronic.” He said there’s constant low-balling of costs to sell programs to Navy leaders and then to Congress.

© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

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