White House budget director calls for fifth public shipyard amid push to expand fleet

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is pushing for a fifth public shipyard to support a growing fleet, the head of the Office of Management and Budget said Wednesday.

The Trump administration’s budget request includes $65.8 billion for shipbuilding alone for fiscal 2027, and calls for expanding the Navy’s inventory to 450 ships — including battle force ships, auxiliary ships, and unmanned vessels — by 2031. The request also includes $1.85 billion in reconciliation funding to study whether foreign shipyards could be used to build US warships — with designs on possibly procuring the first vessel from South Korea or Japan, Breaking Defense previously reported. 

To maintain the vessels in this dramatically expanded fleet, OMB Director Russell Vought said the administration is “pushing hard for an additional public shipyard.”

“If we’re going to spend a one-and-a-half trillion dollars, or have the types of direct foreign investment that’s coming in, we want to make sure that we have the ability to have enough public shipyards to do maintenance,” Vought said at the Washington Times’ IndoPac 2026 event Wednesday. “You’re going to have contracts with companies that are doing maintenance [in private shipyards], and that’s all fine, and will continue, but … to do it at scale is something that is absolutely vital.”

That “scale” of maintenance will require public shipyard workers whose “main mission in life is to repair Navy ships,” Vought said. While private shipyards also perform maintenance on military vessels, the nation’s four public shipyards – located in Norfolk, Va., Portsmouth, Maine, Puget Sound, Wash., and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii – are the ones traditionally tasked with conducting maintenance overhauls and modernizations efforts for the Navy’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines.

Vought pointed to the decision in April to mothball the Los Angeles-class attack submarine Boise, which hadn’t operated at sea in over a decade and suffered a series of maintenance delays. 

“We all agree that at that point it needed to occur, but that had come after 10, 15 years of bad management, and we need to fix that,” Vought said. 

Vought’s comments come after Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle told reporters at the Sea Air Space Symposium in April that the Navy has been studying whether a fifth public shipyard is necessary. Caudle said at the time that another yard raises questions about whether there is a suitable workforce who can staff it — and how long it would take to grow that force.

“A new yard is expensive, and so is that infrastructure worth it if I can’t get the workforce there?” Caudle said. 

The Navy is currently in the middle of upgrading its four public shipyards, and launched the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program (SIOP) program office in 2018 as part of a more than 20-year effort to modernize the dry docks and standard equipment.