Trump’s Golden Fleet Could Leave Taxpayers With $275 Billion Bill
President Donald Trump's proposed fleet of massive new battleships could cost American taxpayers approximately $275 billion, even as the Navy struggles to construct the warships it already has.
Francis Kapper · Nov 6, 2026 · 4 min read
President Donald Trump’s proposed fleet of massive new battleships could cost American taxpayers approximately $275 billion, even as the Navy struggles to construct the warships it already has.
The first Trump-class battleship alone could cost $23.4 billion, nearly six times an early $4 billion estimate, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The proposed program would place additional pressure on America’s already strained shipbuilding industry, potentially diverting resources from other naval priorities.
The White House and U.S. Navy were initially discussing massive new surface combatants displacing between 15,000 and 20,000 tons in November 2025, Breaking Defense reported, citing unnamed officials through earlier reporting and military analysts.
The proposed funding was intended to help revive an American shipbuilding sector that has fallen far behind China in overall production capacity.
“China’s shipbuilding capacity outstrips the United States 236-to-1,” former U.S. Navy Capt. Morgan Murphy previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “That is a national security emergency.”
“Quantity does have a quality of its own,” former Navy Secretary John Phelan told the DCNF in April, defending the administration’s efforts to restore domestic maritime production.
Trump formally announced the new Trump-class battleships in December 2025, proposing vessels displacing between 30,000 and 40,000 tons. Construction of the first vessel, the USS Defiant, was initially targeted for the early 2030s, according to the U.S. Navy.
The Navy subsequently outlined plans to purchase 15 nuclear-powered battleships between 2028 and 2056, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The office estimated that each subsequent battleship would cost approximately $18 billion, bringing the entire program to $275 billion.
The Navy’s own earlier estimate placed the first battleship at $15.1 billion, with the next two costing approximately $10.2 billion each. However, those figures assumed conventional propulsion rather than the nuclear-powered design subsequently incorporated into the Navy’s shipbuilding plan, according to the Congressional Budget Office.