President Donald Trump’s plan to build the largest U.S. Navy warships since World War II could carry a staggering $275 billion price tag, while America’s shipbuilding industry may lack the capacity to construct them, according to a new report released Thursday by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
Each of the 15 planned nuclear-powered warships is expected to cost more than $18 billion, placing them in the same price range as the Navy’s Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers—the most expensive warships ever built.
The enormous cost of the vessels, dubbed “Trump ships,” would increase the Navy’s annual procurement budget for major surface combatants by more than two-thirds, rising from $11 billion in 2025 to $18 billion by 2027, according to the CBO.
The Trump administration unveiled the warship program last December, saying the vessels would be equipped with state-of-the-art cannons and missiles, hypersonic weapons, electromagnetic railguns, cruise missiles, and what President Trump described as “the most sophisticated lasers in the world.” The Navy later announced that the ships would also carry nuclear-armed cruise missiles, making them the most powerful surface combatants in the U.S. arsenal after its ballistic missile submarines.
Under the Navy’s 2027 shipbuilding plan released in May, the United States intends to acquire 15 of the 35,000-ton warships between 2028 and 2056. The CBO estimates the first ship alone would cost $23.4 billion, with each subsequent vessel costing approximately $18 billion. Those figures represent a significant increase over earlier estimates, which were based on a conventionally powered design rather than the final nuclear-powered version.
Compared with other U.S. naval programs, the new ships would rank among the most expensive ever built. The USS Gerald R. Ford, commissioned in 2017, cost approximately $13.3 billion, while newer Ford-class carriers are projected to cost around $22 billion each. Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, meanwhile, are expected to cost roughly $10 billion apiece.
Cost, however, is only part of the challenge. According to the CBO, U.S. shipyards may struggle to build vessels of this size. The new warships will be roughly three-and-a-half times larger than the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers that currently dominate American surface fleet production.
By 2035, the Navy’s plan would more than double the total tonnage of large combat ships that American shipyards must produce annually. The CBO warned that such a dramatic increase could strain the country’s shipbuilding industry, which has already experienced chronic delays and budget overruns. In 2025, then-Secretary of the Navy John Phelan told Congress that the Navy’s flagship shipbuilding program was already running six months behind schedule and 57 percent over budget, testifying that “all of our programs are a mess.”
The report also notes that Bath Iron Works in Maine and Ingalls Shipbuilding in Mississippi—the Navy’s two primary builders of surface combatants—are already struggling to deliver Arleigh Burke-class destroyers on time, with average delays approaching five years. Neither shipyard is equipped to construct nuclear-powered surface warships, leaving Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia as the likely builder. The CBO warns that assigning the program there could further delay aircraft carrier and submarine production already underway.
Finally, the report questions whether investing so heavily in massive surface warships remains the right strategy as low-cost drones, hypersonic missiles, advanced submarines, and cyber warfare continue reshaping naval combat. Retired Admiral James Stavridis argued earlier this year that concentrating so much firepower and so many sailors on a single platform may no longer make strategic sense in an era of increasingly sophisticated precision weapons.
Whether the program ultimately succeeds or not, the report underscores the enormous financial, industrial, and strategic challenges facing one of the most ambitious naval modernization efforts in American history.