Blowing his one 'worthy cause': Trump is sinking his shipbuilding promise

Washington Monthly writer Arnav Rao reports President Donald Trump has gutted the very offices, funding streams, and foreign partnerships that could have restored the nation’s maritime strength, nine months after he pledged to invigorate it.

Trump entered the White House promising that the United States would begin building ships “very fast, very soon.”

“Unlike many of Trump’s other policy priorities, this one at least addresses a worthy cause,” said Rao. “A strong maritime sector underpins everything from trade resilience to military readiness. Merchant ships transport critical cargoes across oceans, transport aid during disasters, and sustain the skilled mariners that the military relies on for sealift in wartime.”

Former national security adviser and Trump’s shipbuilding central architect Mike Waltz got pushed out for his role in Signalgate. Soon after, Rao reports, Ian Bennitt, the senior director tapped to lead the shipbuilding office, resigned.

“And because of Trump’s cuts to the NSC, five of seven staffers in the shipbuilding office soon followed,” said Rao. “Then, in a clear sign that maritime strategy was no longer a priority, the office was quietly downgraded, moved out of the NSC, and folded into the Office of Management and Budget.”

Rao adds that no administrator has been confirmed over the Maritime Administration, which oversees shipping.

The United States also faces a shortage of thousands of mariners, says Rao, and the administration has done little to strengthen the maritime pipeline. Trump-led appropriations bills have also starved maritime capacity and strangled grants which failed to meet demand even at their best.

Trump’s chaotic policies are also discouraging foreign allies from stepping up to the plate. One of South Korea’s largest shipbuilders, Hanwha Ocean, had acquired Philadelphia Shipyard in 2024 and appeared ready to make substantial investments to modernize it just before Trump staged a highly publicized immigration raid at a Georgia battery plant operated by South Korean firms. Rao said this triggered “diplomatic tensions and cast significant doubt on the future” of Korea’s U.S. investments.

Finally, Rao said Trump is trampling pivotal upgrades in shipbuilding technology and “eliminating a potential opportunity for the United States to break into the shipbuilding sector” as other nations forge ahead with new and novel boat and technology designs. And he’s let ships sit idle and food rot in warehouses, which had a “knock-on effect of sidelining mariners.”

“The armed forces depend on commercial mariners and ships to supplement their sealift fleet. As that pool shrinks, so does military readiness,” Rao said. And while China leveraged “decades of government support and industrial planning to become a shipbuilding powerhouse,” Trump’s approach “has offered the opposite.”

Read the Washington Monthly report at this link.