Money alone won’t fix the Navy’s shipbuilding woes, lawmaker says

Congress may need to “micromanage” the Navy’s efforts to boost the submarine industrial base going forward, after the service asked for billions of dollars in supplemental funding requests last year on top of the annual budget, said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.

“Our oversight role is going to have to be more into…micromanaging this,” Kaine said during the Surface Naval Association’s national symposium on Wednesday, noting that sometimes lawmakers can assume, “if we just put the budget to it, we’re going to solve the problem.” But in this case, he said, “That’s not enough to solve the problem.” 

The Navy has repeatedly sought—and recieved—additional funding to bolster the submarine industrial base in recent years. Moreover, the Navy’s current shipbuilding plan will require production costs to increase in coming decades at the rate of about $40 billion a year, according to a recent Congressional Budget Office analysis. 

“You saw, for example, in the anomaly that we did a year in to continue to put more dollars into submarine production. That’s a recognition that, OK, we have to do more. And we did that—even though we had put in millions of dollars for the very same priority during the supplemental building we passed in April,” he said. “So we put money into this workforce to advance production in April, and then we came back and did more, and that was on top of the base defense budget.”

Kaine’s comments come as lawmakers have criticized the Navy for obfuscating details for submarine production requests. 

“We are concerned with the lack of transparency that has occurred between the Navy and Congress over the last 18 months. The Navy negotiated a funding strategy with industry that would have addressed cost growth, future cost to complete, workforce wage increases and infrastructure investments at both shipyards. The Navy did this in isolation and failed to not only inform Congress but also the Office of Management and Budget,” lawmakers wrote in an explanatory statement for the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, in response to language authorizing additional funding for Virginia-class submarine production.  

Lawmakers said the Navy’s “lack of communication” led to the request for nearly $6 billion in emergency funding. 

“At no point during the normal budgeting and legislative process did the Navy inform Congress that there was large cost growth on the fiscal year 2024 submarines and the one fiscal year 2025 submarine being requested. Unfortunately, the lack of communication regarding program challenges and potential solutions has left Congress with few options to address this situation and likely none that will rectify it going forward,” the document states. 

Outgoing Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro has denied the lack of transparency accusation, saying the funding gaps were linked to Congress’ inability to pass budgets and continuing resolutions on time, Breaking Defense reported. 

The increased Navy spending and program cost overruns will likely be a key issue for the incoming administration, but any fix will require bipartisan support. 

Kaine plans to work with shipbuilders, the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Pentagon, and the incoming Trump administration “to develop a strategy to get America’s shipbuilding programs back on track and ensure that investments are structured in the most efficient way,” according to a congressional staffer.

“I have some differences of opinion on some of these issues with the president and incoming team, but not on this issue. I think we’re really on the same page, and we’ve got to do much better,” Kaine said at the conference.

For Kaine, money can’t be the entire solution to shipbuilding capacity woes.

“It’s not just going to be doing more of what we have been doing. It may be doing some more, but it’s also going to be doing some things differently,” he said. 

Those “different” things include the Navy’s unconventional advertising push to lure jobseekers into manufacturing roles. 

“If you turn on the football games this weekend, you’re going to see ads about the submarine industrial base,” he said. “You’re going to see it during the Commanders game on Saturday. You’re going to start to see ads. And that reflects an awareness that we have to do things differently. The ads are just [the]…wrapping paper part of that, but we’ve got to do an awful lot more differently.”