The Navy Just Asked Congress
for 15 Nuclear Battleships.
The Bill Could Reach $300 Billion.
The U.S. Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan, submitted to Congress on May 11, 2026, calls for 15 nuclear-powered “Trump-class” battleships — designation BBG(X), lead hull USS Defiant (BBG-1)— built across the next three decades and into service through 2055. It is the largest new American surface-combatant program since the 1980s and, if it lands at its currently projected unit cost, the most expensive surface-warship class ever procured.
Per the FY27 budget submission, the lead ship is priced at roughly $17 billion; the second hull at about $13 billion in FY30; the first three hulls together at $43.5 billion through 2031. Apply the Navy’s own follow-on figure of $13B per hull across all 15 ships and the program comes to roughly $200 billion. Apply the Congressional Budget Office’s projected ceiling and the program clears $300 billion. Either number is a record. The Daily Caller’s framing — that this could be the largest U.S. naval shipbuilding project ever — is, by the Navy’s own arithmetic, accurate.
The frame matters because of the strategic gap the program is trying to close. China’s PLA Navy now operates roughly 370 battle-force ships against the U.S. Navy’s ~287, and a declassified Office of Naval Intelligence slide pegs Chinese shipyards at 232 timesthe annual warship-construction capacity of American yards. The Trump-class is the Navy’s biggest single bet that the U.S. industrial base can be re-jumpstarted. It is also, on the early arithmetic, the kind of bet that lives or dies on whether the cost line stays anywhere near the official estimate — a line every comparable Navy program of the last 25 years has missed.
- 15Trump-class hulls (BBG(X))Lead ship USS Defiant (BBG-1) plus 14 follow-ons across the FY27 30-year shipbuilding plan, with deliveries running through 2055.
- $17B / $13Blead hull / follow-on hullNavy FY28 procurement request: $17B for USS Defiant in FY28, ~$13B for the second hull in FY30. CBO projects $14.3B–$20.6B for the lead ship and $9B–$13B per follow-on.
- $200B–$300Bimplied total program costRange derived from Navy follow-on price of ~$13B (low end) and CBO ceiling of ~$20B per hull (high end) applied across 15 ships. Daily Caller's $14.5B-per-ship arithmetic falls inside the band.
- FY28construction start, USS DefiantKeel-laying targeted for FY28 with delivery projected for 2036; FY27 budget asks Congress for $1B advance procurement plus $837M in R&D.
- 232×China shipbuilding capacity vs. U.S.Office of Naval Intelligence: ~23.25M tons annual Chinese capacity vs. <100K tons U.S. PLAN at ~370 hulls today vs. U.S. Navy at ~287; the gap that the Trump-class plan is built to address.
Designation: BBG(X) — “guided-missile battleship,” a hull designation the U.S. Navy has not used since the Iowa-class returned the BB prefix to retirement in 1992. The G suffix marks it as a guided-missile platform; the X indicates a developmental class.
Displacement: 35,000+ tons (some Navy briefings have referenced 40,000-ton variants). For comparison: an Arleigh Burke DDG-51 Flight III is roughly 9,800 tons; a Zumwalt-class DDG-1000 is ~16,000 tons; the Iowa-class fast battleships were ~57,500 tons fully loaded.
Length / beam / speed:840–880 ft length overall, 105–115 ft beam, >30 knots. Crew complement 650–800.
Propulsion: Nuclear — confirmed in the Navy’s May 11, 2026 plan submission. The decision reverses Sec. Phelan’s April public statement that nuclear propulsion was “unlikely”; Phelan was fired the next day.
Primary armament:128-cell Mark 41 vertical launch system (more than three times an Arleigh Burke’s 96 cells), 12-cell Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic battery, Surface Launch Cruise Missile–Nuclear (SLCM-N) capability, two 5-inch / 62-caliber Mk 45 main guns, and design provisions for a 32-megajoule electromagnetic railgun and high-energy laser systems.
What it is not: Despite the BBG label and the “battleship” nameplate, this is not a return of the 16-inch Iowa-class. It is, in capability terms, a heavy nuclear-powered guided-missile cruiser at battleship displacement — a magazine-depth platform the Navy says it needs to keep up with peer-adversary missile inventories.
“USS Defiant will be the largest, deadliest and most versatile and best-looking warship anywhere on the world's oceans.”
Sec. of the Navy John Phelan · December 22, 2025 announcement of the Trump-class program
Three numbers tell the story. The Navy’s own figure for the lead hull is $17 billion. The follow-on hull two years later is priced at $13 billion. The Congressional Budget Office, in its January 2026 analysis by senior naval analyst Eric Labs, projects the lead hull at $14.3B–$20.6B if ordered today and $15.1B–$21.6B if ordered in 2030 — with follow-ons at $9B–$13B each. None of those figures are small.
FY27 (the immediate ask before Congress):$1 billion in advance procurement for USS Defiant, plus $837 million in design and development R&D. Department of the Navy total: $377.5 billion. Total Navy shipbuilding line: $65.8 billion — a 48% jump over FY26 and the second-largest naval shipbuilding request in real (inflation-adjusted) terms since 1955.
FY28: Approximately $17 billion in procurement for the lead hull. Construction at the building yard begins; keel-laying expected within the fiscal year.
FY30: Approximately $13 billion for the second hull (BBG-2).
First three hulls (through 2031):$43.5 billion combined — roughly $14.5 billion per hull averaged across the three.
Five-year R&D and design: $46 billion through FY31.
Comparison anchors: A USS Gerald R. Ford-class supercarrier costs ~$13 billion. An Arleigh Burke DDG-51 Flight III costs ~$2.7 billion. A Constellation-class FFG-62 frigate is now estimated at $1.4 billion, up from $940 million at award. The Trump-class lead hull is therefore priced higher than the world’s most expensive warship currently in service.
The appropriators who will decide whether those numbers survive contact with Capitol Hill are named. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, is on record favoring a doubling of shipbuilding tonnage and led the SASC FY27 hearing on the Pentagon budget in April 2026. Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), SASC ranking member — whose state is home to Naval Station Newport and the Naval Undersea Warfare Center — will be the lead Democratic vote on whether to authorize the Trump-class line. On the House side, the chairs of the HASC Seapower & Projection Forces Subcommittee and the SASC Seapower Subcommittee will mark up the program through the FY27 NDAA cycle.
The candidate yards: Per Congressional Research Service review, only three U.S. private shipyards are physically and technically capable of building a 35,000-ton nuclear surface combatant: Newport News Shipbuilding (Huntington Ingalls Industries / HII, Virginia) — the only yard currently certified to build nuclear-powered surface vessels (the Ford-class carriers); Ingalls Shipbuilding (HII, Pascagoula, MS); and Bath Iron Works (General Dynamics, Bath, ME).
The current load: Newport News is fully committed through the next decade to Ford-class carriers (CVN-80, 81, 82) and Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines (in partnership with Electric Boat). Ingalls and Bath Iron Works are mid-stream on a $14.58 billion 10-hull Flight III Arleigh Burke multi-year contract awarded in 2023 (Ingalls 7 hulls, Bath 3) plus continuing San Antonio-class amphibs (Ingalls) and DDG-1000 sustainment (Bath).
The workforce gap: The June 2025 GAO report notes that despite a near-doubling of the Navy shipbuilding budget over two decades, the U.S. Navy has “no more ships today than when it released its first 30-year shipbuilding plan in 2003.” Construction timelines for destroyers and submarines now average 8–9 years versus 5–6 in the early 2000s. Naval architects, certified welders, and nuclear-trained pipefitters are the binding constraints.
The foreign-yard fork: The FY27 plan opens the door, narrowly, to allied production — $450M for one consolidated cargo replenishment tanker built overseas in FY27, $2.3B over five years for five fuel tankers potentially built abroad. Combatants stay U.S.-built. Sec. Phelan reportedly proposed building Trump-class hulls at allied yards (Hanwha’s Philly Shipyard, or Korean / Japanese yards); Trump rejected it; Phelan was out the next day.
The strategic case for the Trump-class is not made in tonnage or megajoules. It is made in the comparison to the People’s Liberation Army Navy. By the Pentagon’s own counting, the PLAN is now the largest navy in the world by hull count: roughly 370 battle-force ships today, projected to ~395 in 2025 and ~435 by 2030. The U.S. Navy is at ~287 in 2026 and the Navy’s own plan keeps the fleet near 290 through 2030. The U.S. Navy is, in absolute terms, falling further behind every year.
Capacity: Office of Naval Intelligence (declassified slide): Chinese shipyards have ~23.25 million tons of annual ship-construction capacity versus less than 100,000 tons in the United States — a ratio of roughly 232 to 1.
Output, last year: The PLAN added ~30 ships to its battle force in the most recent reporting year. The U.S. Navy added two.
Output, last decade: China launched more than 100 naval vessels. The U.S. launched fewer than 50.
What the Trump-class is and is not: Fifteen battleships across 30 years — one every two years on average — does not close the hull-count gap with China. It is a magazine-depth and presence play, not a numbers play. The numbers play is the unmanned and frigate “low end” of Sec. Phelan’s announced “high-low mix” — and that low end is still mostly a slide deck.
The case against the Trump-class is not partisan. It is institutional, and it is mostly about cost realism on programs the Navy has not, in living memory, gotten right.
GAO-25-108225 (June 2025) — “Enduring Challenges Call for Systemic Change”: The DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer ended up at $10.6 billion per hull — seven times the original estimate. The Constellation-class frigate added $200M+ in lead-ship cost growth before any keel was laid. Of 90 GAO recommendations to the Navy on shipbuilding since 2015, 60 are still unresolved.
GAO-24-106546 — the Constellation FFG-62 file: The frigate that was supposed to be a low-risk, off-the-shelf Italian FREMM derivative is now 759 metric tons (~13%) overweight, three years late, and headed to $1.4B per hull versus the original $940M. The April 2026 contractual delivery date is, in the Navy’s own words, “unachievable.” Only the first two hulls are now confirmed at Fincantieri Marinette — the planned 20-ship class is on hold.
CBO (Jan 2026, analyst Eric Labs): Projects the Trump-class lead hull at $14.3B–$20.6B today and $15.1B–$21.6B in 2030. That is a built-in $3B–$4B variance the Navy’s own $17B figure does not account for.
Bryan Clark (Hudson Institute): “There’s no cost savings really to be gained by going nuclear — if anything, it’s going to cost a little bit more.” Clark estimates a Trump-class hull will run two to three times the cost of an Arleigh Burke — at minimum.
The political flank: Notus reports the program “could be a target for Democrats if their party regains control of Congress or the White House.” A 30-year build profile means the Trump-class is, by design, an across-administrations bet. It will outlast the administration that named it.
President Donald Trump (R)— announced the class on December 22, 2025; rejected Sec. Phelan’s allied-shipbuilding proposal in April 2026.
Sec. of Defense Pete Hegseth (R)— delivered the firing decision to Sec. Phelan on April 22, 2026, per CNBC and the New York Times.
Sec. of the Navy John C. Phelan — named the class “Trump-class,” designated USS Defiant, framed the “Golden Fleet” program at the 2026 WEST conference in February. Fired April 22, 2026 after declining to resign over the foreign-shipbuilding disagreement.
Acting Sec. of the Navy Hung Cao— elevated April 2026; quoted in May saying the plan delivers “a larger, more lethal, and more balanced fleet.”
Adm. Daryl Caudle, Chief of Naval Operations— on record that nuclear propulsion “pushes the battleship into a timeframe that just didn’t meet the operational need” — a position now overruled by the May 11 plan.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), SASC chair — champion of the “arsenal of democracy” reindustrialization push and a 50%+ shipbuilding-budget increase; lead authorizer for the Trump-class line.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), SASC ranking member — the swing Democratic vote on the line item.
The Navy’s 30-year plan is a serious answer to a real problem — the U.S. is being out-built by China at a 232-to-1 yard ratio, and a magazine-depth surface combatant is a defensible piece of the answer. The plan’s cost is also $200B–$300B, the lead hull is more expensive than a Ford-class carrier, the only yard certified for nuclear surface vessels is already booked through the 2030s, and every comparable Navy program of the last 25 years has come in late and over. The Trump-class will be judged on whether it breaks that pattern. The first $17B procurement check, due in FY28, is the first test.
I commend @SECNAV for canceling the troubled Constellation-class frigate program — a tough but vital call. Biden-era design changes derailed the contractor, but Fincantieri Marinette Marine will remain key to our shipbuilding future. This is a clear signal that Navy program accountability is back.
Visited Bath Iron Works to thank the men and women building the steel backbone of the United States Navy. Nobody builds it better. President Trump’s Golden Fleet starts in yards like this one. The era of slow-walking American shipbuilding is over.
The Department of the Navy submitted its FY2027 30-year shipbuilding plan to Congress. The plan supports a larger, more lethal, more balanced fleet — including the new nuclear-powered Trump-class battleship USS Defiant (BBG-1).
New Navy Shipbuilding Plan: Trump-class battleship will be nuclear-powered; carrier design is under review. Lead hull priced at ~$17B; 15 BBG(X) hulls planned across the next 30 years through 2055.
President Donald J. Trump · Truth Social · Dec 25, 2025 — Year-end remarks naming the ‘Golden Dome, the Golden Fleet, the next generation of battleships.’
President Donald J. Trump · Truth Social · Feb 5, 2026 — ‘We are even adding Battleships, which are 100 times more powerful than the ones that roamed the Seas during World War II.’