U.S. Secretary of the Navy John Phelan speaks, after President Donald Trump announced the Navy's "Golden Fleet", at Mar-a-lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., December 22, 2025. REUTERS/Jessica Koscielniak/File Photo
Late Wednesday evening, the Secretary of the Navy was booted as part of an ongoing purge of the military by President Donald Trump and his administration.
According to one detail in the CNN report, Navy Secretary John Phelan didn't believe Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth when he said he was being fired.
Sources told CNN that all of it came to a head during a meeting about shipbuilding. Trump wants a new "Golden Fleet" or "Trump-class" ships and subs for the U.S. military. But the process of making such ships isn't a quick one.
"It will take five years for the two shipbuilders that build Virginia-class attack boats to deliver two submarines a year, according to the Navy’s latest estimates of the production schedule," the U.S. Naval Institute wrote in a 2023 report. "The two yards are currently on a pace to deliver about 1.2 submarines a year, Navy officials told USNI News this week."
Trump blames Phelan for the slow progress on building his fleet, so, he told Hegseth to "take care of it," CNN said.
"The official said Phelan, though, did not appear to believe Trump was aware of the message, and he soon began phoning other White House officials asking if they had heard he had been told to resign and whether they knew if the president was aware of it," the report explained.
Two White House staffers told Phelan that it was Trump personally who wanted him out. Phelan still didn't believe it, demanding to hear from the president himself, "or someone close to him" that he was canned. So, he came to the White House grounds looking for an official in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. He was asking around if they had any details about what was happening.
Phelan ultimately asked to meet with Trump and went straight to the West Wing, an official told CNN. There, Trump confirmed he was out.
Over the past several weeks, Trump has been shuffling out many officials in his administration whom he hired as loyalists. Phelan, for example, and his wife raised millions for Trump's 2024 campaign. But he has no experience in the Navy and has never served in the military at all.
He's also never worked in any capacity doing shipbuilding or even defense contracting. He was an investor and banking analyst.
After his name was announced in 2024 as the new secretary, experts began questioning whether it was the right time to have someone with no military experience running a key branch of the military.
“It will be difficult for anyone without experience in the Pentagon to take over the leadership of a service and do a good job,” Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow and director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, told the Associated Press. “Services are sprawling organizations with distinct cultures, subcultures and bureaucratic interests, and where decisions are made through many formal processes. To change a service’s plans, one must understand this Byzantine landscape.”
On Thursday morning, Trump issued an order to the Navy via TruthSocial to shoot to kill anyone who violates the U.S. Navy blockade.