WASHINGTON — Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought announced the Trump administration's push for an additional public shipyard as part of its fiscal year 2027 defense budget request. The budget request, dated March 18, 2026, includes $65.8 billion for shipbuilding and proposes expanding the Navy's inventory to 450 ships by 2031.

Vought said the administration seeks an additional public shipyard to increase maintenance capacity. The 450-ship inventory target includes battle force ships, auxiliary ships, and unmanned vessels.

Vought indicated that the scale of maintenance needed would require public shipyard workers dedicated to repairing Navy ships. "If we're going to spend a one-and-a-half trillion dollars, or have the types of direct foreign investment that's coming in, we want to make sure that we have the ability to have enough public shipyards to do maintenance," Vought said. He also noted that contracts with private shipyards for maintenance would continue. "You're going to have contracts with companies that are doing maintenance [in private shipyards], and that's all fine, and will continue, but … to do it at scale is something that is absolutely vital," Vought said.

The budget request also allocates $1.85 billion in reconciliation funding to study the potential use of foreign shipyards for building U.S. warships. The U.S. currently operates four public shipyards in Norfolk, Virginia; Portsmouth, Maine; Puget Sound, Washington; and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. These facilities are generally tasked with maintenance overhauls and modernizations for nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines.

In April 2025, the Navy mothballed the Los Angeles-class attack submarine Boise, which had not operated at sea for over a decade due to maintenance delays. Vought commented on the situation, stating, "We all agree that at that point it needed to occur, but that had come after 10, 15 years of bad management, and we need to fix that."

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle told reporters in April 2025 at the Sea Air Space Symposium that the Navy has been studying the necessity of a fifth public shipyard. Caudle raised considerations regarding a new facility, stating, "A new yard is expensive, and so is that infrastructure worth it if I can't get the workforce there?" The Navy launched the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program office in 2018 as part of a multi-year effort to modernize dry docks and standard equipment.