The staggering potential cost of Donald Trump’s proposed “golden fleet” of huge, nuclear-powered Navy battleships has been revealed.
A report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the president’s plans to commission a so-called “Trump class” of heavily armed battleships could cost about $275 billion.
This figure is nearly double what the Navy initially estimated the fleet of warships would cost taxpayers, with the CBO also warning that the country’s shipbuilding industry could struggle even to construct them.
The first “Trump Class” battleship, the USS Defiant, with its planned nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile, would alone cost around $23.4 billion—an increase of more than $8 billion from the original estimate—and take about eight years to complete.
The remaining 14 ships, which Trump wants to be powered by nuclear reactors, would cost an average of just over $18 billion each, the CBO estimates.
The CBO report was carried out at the request of Sen. Jeff Merkley, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee.
“At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, gas, healthcare, and child care, Congress cannot throw hundreds of billions of dollars at Trump’s ‘Golden Fleet,’ including plastering his name across a new battleship,” the Oregon Democrat said in a statement.
“While we continue to see too many Pentagon programs burdened by cost overruns, delays, and unrealistic promises that fail to meet reality, Congress cannot afford to commit to another massive military boondoggle that will only succeed in filling the coffers of the military-industrial complex.”
The mammoth taxpayer cost of the new class of battleships is not the only potential issue, as the CBO warns that U.S. shipyards may not have the capacity to build them.
“By 2035, the Navy’s 2027 plan would more than double the tonnage of large surface combatants that shipbuilders would need to produce. Overall, the tonnage of large surface combatants to be constructed would need to increase by 60 percent, while the tonnage of small surface combatants would decrease by about 40 percent,” the report said.
“Accommodating such a sizable increase in the production of large surface combatants could be a challenge for the shipbuilding industry.”
The CBO notes that if the Defiant is built under specifications previously released by the Navy, it would be the biggest naval warship in the world and larger than any surface combatant built for the Navy since World War II.
The Defiant could be 880 feet long and have a full-load displacement—the maximum weight a ship can carry—of 35,000 tons.
“It would be more than three and a half times the size of the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer and more than twice the size of the Zumwalt-class guided-missile destroyer,” the CBO said.
The report also notes that Bath Iron Works in Maine and Ingalls Shipbuilding in Mississippi have constructed surface combatants for decades, and both have the expertise to build a 35,000-ton battleship. However, neither is certified by the Navy to perform nuclear power-related work in ship construction.
“And both are facing challenges in building destroyers on schedule,” the report adds.
Trump has become obsessed with building a new mega-fleet and has admitted he wanted to replicate the ships he saw as a child while watching the 1950s World War II documentary television series Victory at Sea.
A U.K.-based naval warship expert previously told the Daily Beast that the Trump-class battleships have so many add-ons that they offer only marginally greater missile-launch capacity than a current U.S. Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser that is one-third the size.
“It seems to be trying to do a bit of everything, and the problem with things that do everything is that they do none of them well,” said Dr. Emma Salisbury, a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s National Security Program and an associate fellow at the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre.
“It seems to me like, ‘Oh, let’s get a railgun. Let’s put that on. Let’s get missiles. I’m just surprised he didn’t add a ballroom and a golf course.’”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the Pentagon for comment.
