- President Trump has directed Elon Musk’s DOGE to investigate wasteful Pentagon spending.
- White House NSA advisor Mike Waltz called US shipbuilding as “an absolute mess.”
- Problems like ballooning costs, delays, and a hollowed industrial base are impacting shipbuilding.
President Donald Trump has given Elon Musk’s DOGE a new target — the Department of Defense. The White House expects it to find billions of dollars in waste, including in what his national security adviser called the “absolute mess” in US shipbuilding.
This opens the door to DOGE cost-cutters trying to fire their way to efficiency in the federal bureaucracy that oversees shipbuilding, one part of the system struggling to design, buy, and build American warships.
The largest problem driving the ship delays and soaring costs, per naval analysts, is one not easily solved: The decline of the US shipbuilding industry and the shrinking of its workforce.
This weekend, President Donald Trump said he expected Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to “find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse” in the Pentagon. The Department of Defense’s budget is over $800 billion, and it failed its seventh consecutive audit last year, meaning there’s a lot of funding unaccounted for. The aim is to change that.
“We need to know when we spend dollars,” Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, said Sunday in an interview with Fox News. “We need to know where they’re going and why. That’s simple accounting, and that has not existed at the Defense Department.”
White House National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, a retired Army colonel, specifically pointed to US military shipbuilding programs as a point of interest. On Sunday, Waltz said on NBC’s Meet the Press there was “plenty to look into in shipbuilding, which is an absolute mess, to look into contracting, into procurement.”
He also expressed concern about the process, which pays shipbuilders to begin working before designs are finished. “You pay people right up front and then they don’t deliver for years and years and years,” and “maintenance and costs overrun,” he said.
What are the problems?
The US Navy is the most powerful and most advanced naval force in the world today, but the Big Navy programs and industrial base that this force depends are struggling.
There has been a string of broken programs, such as the Littoral Combat Ship, some of which are now being decommissioned decades before their time, and the Zumwalt-class destroyers, the mission and armaments for which were a question mark for years. Each of the destroyers costs around $8 billion.
The new USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier’s development was hamstrung by changing requirements and the integration of dozens of new technologies. It was delivered years behind schedule to the tune of roughly $13 billion.
And even now, major programs are facing tremendous delays. Last year, a Navy review found that top military shipbuilding projects, new submarines and surface ships, are delayed by years and facing rising costs.
That includes Block IV Virginia-class attack submarines, Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, the Constellation-class guided missile frigate, and the next Ford-class aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. The delays range, but most are a full year or two behind schedule.
The design and construction of these warships are overseen by Naval Sea Systems Command, which has a workforce of over 75,000 civilian and military personnel.
What are the causes?
Lawmakers, officials, government watchdogs, and experts have called attention to American shipbuilding woes, including weakened domestic industrial capacity, budget and schedule issues, and last-minute design changes.
Other challenges include the lingering effects of COVID-19, inflation, supply chain breakdowns, and a dwindling workforce.
US Navy officials, analysts, and industry experts have said inconsistent defense budgets, shifting Navy requirements and cost estimates, and reduced domestic capacity have been hollowing out the Navy’s shipbuilding capabilities for decades.
The industrial base has shrunk, and the Navy is reliant on a few shipbuilders for design and construction. This same issue constrains maintenance and repair. Domestic capacity is limited, and international yards aren’t an option due to current prohibitions.
Mackenzie Eaglen, a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, wrote last year that the Navy needs to break what she called the “doom loop.” Shipbuilding, maintenance, and repair costs continue to rise as the fleet ages and shrinks. New construction issues arise in the process. And while the Navy criticizes shipbuilders, shipbuilders are lamenting the rising costs of wages, inflationary pressures, and budget uncertainty.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that under the Navy’s 2025 shipbuilding plan, total costs would average $40 billion per year in 2024 for the next 30 years, about 17% more than the Navy estimates. That comes as the Navy prioritizes building a larger fleet with more distributed firepower. The goal is 390 total battleforce ships by 2054.
The CBO said that the Navy’s plan would put a strain on the US industrial base, meaning “over the next 30 years, the nation’s shipyards would need to produce substantially more naval tonnage than they have produced over the past 10 years. The rate of production of nuclear-powered submarines, in particular, would need to increase significantly.”
Why do shipbuilding problems matter?
America’s top rival, China, is the world’s leading shipbuilder. It has been building up its navy by leveraging commercial and military shipyards. Unclassified US Navy data indicates China has 230 times the US shipbuilding capacity. Seapower is a critical element of national power.
In a potential war with the US, China could have the advantage in combat repair and replacement.
The US Navy can’t catch up in quantity, but it has options. It is looking into better sustaining its ships and subs, extending the lives of certain assets, fixing maintenance backlogs, and prioritizing autonomous systems.
Whether DOGE ultimately targets shipbuilding when it starts looking into the Pentagon remains to be seen. There’s a lot of waste in the department and bipartisan concerns about that.
The DOGE is acting like an internal consultancy, triggering controversies and alarm as it sweeps through government agencies. Its head, Elon Musk, sought to shut down USAID and tried to access Treasury’s tightly controlled payment systems. A review of Pentagon programs could trigger concerns about the security of defense systems and who, exactly, is digging into the department’s plans and projects.
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