At the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit, President Trump again stated that he wants reconciliation dollars spent on ships built overseas. But as Congress allocates those taxpayer funds, it and the White House should ask whether we’ve actually exhausted what American yards can do.
The desire to build the Navy faster is the right instinct. America’s adversaries are not waiting. China has surpassed the United States in total battle force ships, and the strategic consequences are real. When members of Congress look at reconciliation funding as a vehicle to accelerate naval procurement — and when administration officials weigh waivers on longstanding acquisition constraints — the urgency behind those discussions is entirely legitimate.
But speed without sound judgment is not a strategy. It’s a shortcut. And some shortcuts in defense acquisition carry costs that don’t appear on the invoice.
Proposals to build U.S. military vessels in foreign shipyards — including yards in Japan and South Korea — are being discussed with a seriousness they do not deserve. Before a single reconciliation dollar is committed to that path, Congress and the administration should answer a question that has not been honestly confronted: Have we actually maximized what American shipbuilders can do?
We have not. Not even close.
American shipyards have the facilities, and the institutional knowledge to build more. Smart investments in the shipbuilding industrial and supply base over the past two years, supported by the U.S. Navy, are yielding double digit improvements in shipbuilding throughput. U.S. shipbuilders are outsourcing work through “distributed shipbuilding” partners in new labor markets to grow capacity and build more faster, as the Navy expects.
In its 2026 shipbuilding plan, the Navy estimated that roughly 10% of shipbuilding work is performed at partner sites today, with a goal of 50% in the future. The Trump administration deserves credit for igniting this early U.S. shipbuilding turnaround. What we need now is continued investment in that direction — not a policy signal that suggests American production and workforce is a problem to be solved by going elsewhere.
The case for foreign construction rests on a premise that doesn’t survive scrutiny: that allied yards are a seamless substitute for American ones. They are not. Military shipbuilding is not a commodity. It involves classified systems, advanced combat integration, and proprietary technologies that operate at the edge of what is legally and strategically permissible to share with foreign entities — even close allies. The liability exposure alone, should sensitive systems be compromised in a third-country yard, is significant and largely unquantified by proponents of this approach.
The Trump Administration is already addressing this: the Vessel Construction Manager model is expanding commercial management of new-build contracts, and the FAR/DFARS overhaul under EO 14275 is the most significant federal acquisition reform in over forty years. These reforms deserve the chance to work. Rather than looking abroad to yards operating under different labor laws and safety norms, the better path is to let domestic reform mature and deliver its benefits without compromising the standards that keep American sailors safe.
There are also long-term affordability implications that tend to get lost in the near-term math. Every dollar sent to a foreign yard is a dollar not invested in American workforce development, American tooling, and American industrial capacity. The shipbuilding industrial base is not elastic. Once skilled tradespeople disperse and supply chains atrophy, rebuilding them takes years and costs multiples of what sustaining them would have required. We have seen this dynamic play out before. The lesson has not been cheap.
Congress designed the laws governing military procurement — including the Jones Act and longstanding Buy American provisions — with exactly these risks in mind. Waiving those protections does not make the risks disappear. It simply moves them off the books and onto the backs of future taxpayers and future sailors.
The reconciliation window is real and the moment for investment is now. But the choice is not between building fast with foreign yards or building slow with American ones. The choice is between investing in American capacity — which is ready to be scaled — and squandering a generational opportunity to reestablish the industrial dominance that made the United States the world’s preeminent naval power in the first place.
America’s shipbuilders are not asking to be protected from competition. We are asking for the investment to be made in America that allows U.S. industry to compete at full strength. There is a meaningful difference. Congress should insist on it.