The Trump administration aims to “bulldoze bureaucracy” and dramatically accelerate U.S. commercial and naval shipbuilding to reverse decades of a slide that has left the nation outpaced by China, said White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.
“We have to make sure that the sclerotic way that we have built ships over the last several decades is changed and we get back to the pace that we would have seen in the 1980s under President Reagan,” Mr. Vought said in remarks Wednesday at an event hosted by The Washington Times’ Threat Status platform.
He and other key power players, including U.S. senators and top Pentagon officials, weighed in during the event at the U.S. Navy Memorial in the nation’s capital on President Trump’s Golden Fleet initiative, a modernization plan to aggressively scale up U.S. shipbuilding and naval capabilities.
With Capitol Hill considering Mr. Trump’s proposal for a $1.5 trillion defense budget for fiscal 2027, Mr. Vought emphasized that the administration has created a specific shipbuilding office within the Office of Management and Budget to give the White House more direct influence over the ongoing implementation of the president’s April 2025 executive order titled “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance.”
The Golden Fleet and the broader evolution of American naval power were in the spotlight Wednesday at IndoPac 2026 | Naval Dominance: Shipbuilding, Autonomy & C2.
Purdue University was the event’s official education partner. Defense industry partners included Govini, Hanwha Defense USA, Leonardo DRS, L3Harris Technologies and Lockheed Martin. The data partner was Obviant, a Virginia-based artificial intelligence-driven data intelligence company, which provided extensive and exclusive budget analysis of expected spending on shipbuilding, autonomy and command and control. Each of these three key topics was the focus of a panel discussion moderated by a Threat Status team member.
Other speakers included Rebecca Gassler, the Department of the Navy’s portfolio acquisition executive for robotic and autonomous systems; Justin Fanelli, the Department of the Navy’s chief technology officer; Sen. Todd Young, Indiana Republican; Capt. Randy Cruz, commanding officer of the Naval Research Laboratory; and key C-suite officials from leading defense companies.
Fixing U.S. shipbuilding
Retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the U.S. shipbuilding industry is beset by troubling issues, including workforce production issues, acquisition challenges and “a bunch of people who would rather do nothing than do the right thing.”
He cited three recent Navy shipbuilding initiatives: the Littoral Combat Ship program, the Zumwalt-class stealth destroyers and the Constellation-class frigates.
“That is ‘failure, failure and failure,’” Mr. Montgomery said during a panel discussion. “That doesn’t mean the ships themselves are bad ships and that they wouldn’t do the mission they are assigned. It means they’re massively overbudget.”
In recent years, China has surpassed the U.S. in total ship numbers. It has an estimated 370 naval ships, compared with roughly 295 American ships, though the U.S. still has far superior power projection.
Still, the gap in raw numbers is troubling. To close it, the Trump administration wants $65.8 billion for Navy shipbuilding and conversion in its 2027 budget. The Navy’s annual shipbuilding budget is projected to exceed $60 billion in four of the next five years, according to Obviant data.
Virginia-class and Columbia-class submarines account for the largest line items through 2031, with projected expenditures of $66 billion and $64 billion, respectively. They are followed by billions of dollars for battleships, Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers, the Navy’s aircraft carrier replacement program and other key maritime budget items.
Still, the U.S. also faces questions about whether it has the industrial production capacity to catch up to China.
“The demand for ships and submarines is outpacing our building capacity. Meanwhile, China’s shipbuilding capacity in tonnage is approximately 230 times greater than ours,” Sen. Deb Fischer, Nebraska Republican, said in a keynote address. “We need more nuclear-capable shipyard capacity. We need higher submarine production rates, and we need more missile capacity across our existing fleet.”
Ms. Fischer, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the Navy should build additional shipyards to maintain nuclear-powered surface vessels, such as aircraft carriers and submarines.
OMB’s plan to ‘bulldoze bureaucracy’
Mr. Vought is the only current Cabinet official to have served in the same role in both of Mr. Trump’s administrations. White House insiders often refer to him as the “president’s tool kit.” On Wednesday, he emphasized OMB’s role in ensuring U.S. shipbuilding revitalization.
He said OMB under Mr. Trump has “the ability to bulldoze bureaucracy and to bring a lot of force of the White House and the president in pursuit of a particular policy objective,” and that momentum has only mounted over the past 18 months of the president’s second term.
“What’s different this time is that the president, the administration, put the shipbuilding office within OMB almost as if it’s a stand-alone management division,” Mr. Vought said. “I view it as kind of that seal of importance to the country that we’re always going to have governmentwide emphasis on maritime dominance, on shipbuilding, on using our resources — all of government — to maintain adequate shipbuilding in this country, both commercial and military.
“We are building that shipbuilding office up, and it means that we are a little bit more involved on the shipbuilding side than you would say that all the other things that [Department of War] funds or the federal government is involved in,” the OMB director said.
Autonomous systems in focus
Retired Adm. John Richardson, the 31st chief of naval operations, said Beijing has made enormous investments in a specific vision for how the next global war could be fought. That vision hinges on long-range precision strikes and other capabilities intended to keep the U.S. Navy at a distance and degrade its ability to project power in the Western Pacific.
“Those investments are real, and they deserve serious respect, but they are also fixed,” he said.
China has yet to fully capitalize on evolving technological innovations, such as the autonomous systems revolution and the fusion of AI-enabled sensors, he said.
U.S. policymakers said it is crucial that the nation lead in autonomy, including the production and deployment of huge numbers of aerial, surface and undersea drones.
Rep. Pat Harrigan, a retired U.S. Army officer and combat veteran and a rising Republican star on national security issues, spoke on a panel titled “Autonomy: Scaling Uncrewed Systems for the Indo-Pacific Fight.”
“The future of conflict, there’s no question about it, is going to be separated between those that have autonomy and those that don’t,” said Mr. Harrigan, North Carolina Republican and a member of the House Armed Services Committee.
At the same time, the congressman said, the United States is at a critical juncture in national security, as it gauges the public’s appetite for robust engagement in foreign conflicts.
“If you look at it from a societal perspective and kind of injecting the political lens here, I think very clearly our country does not have the political will to endure long-term conflict,” he said.
Mr. Harrigan suggested that the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine and the recent conflagration in the Middle East have shown American wariness about the prospect of involvement in open-ended wars.
He noted questions about U.S. political will for “even potentially short-term conflict, as I think we’re all realizing right now.”
He emphasized the importance of integrating new technologies to make the U.S. military more nimble and flexible in a tumultuous world.
“If we don’t get that fundamentally correct in all of this exercise we are doing, we are just setting ourselves up for continued military failure like we’ve had,” he said.
In the administration’s budget, funding for sea drones and other unmanned maritime assets is rising rapidly.
The Pentagon is seeking $54.6 billion for its Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, the umbrella initiative overseeing the effort to produce and field drones in large numbers.
The 2027 budget request includes major funding increases for aerial and ground drones, but the largest percentage increases would go to medium unmanned surface vessels and other unmanned systems, such as the Navy’s remotely operated vehicle launched and recovered from a torpedo tube.
Funding for these two initiatives would increase by 584% and 183%, respectively, reaching $270 million and $76 million, according to Obviant data. The Navy intends to deploy more than 30 medium unmanned surface vessels, along with thousands of smaller unmanned surface vessels, in the Indo-Pacific by 2030.
Those vehicles would be crucial to the “Hellscape” envisioned by Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, the head of U.S. Pacific Command, who detailed a plan to use aerial and sea drones in massive numbers to crowd the theater and slow any Chinese attack on Taiwan.
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