When US President Donald Trump first announced US Navy plans for a new fleet of Trump-class battleships, questions were soon asked over the implications of such a programme. In a report released on 5 August 2026 the US Congressional Budget Office addresses some of those implications.
A US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on US Navy plans to embark on a programme to build new ‘Trump-class’ battleships, released on 5 August 2026, confirms what numerous observers had predicted when US President Donald Trump first announced the plan on 22 December 2025: that building a new battleship class would be excessively expensive and tie up US naval shipbuilding capacity for other more modestly sized, but more operationally useful, naval platforms.
The costs and complications in relation to building the new Trump-class battleships were exacerbated on 11 May 2026 when, in announcing its annual 30-year shipbuilding plans, the US Navy declared that the new battleships would be nuclear-powered.
The CBO thus now estimates that the total cost of the navy’s new nuclear-powered guided missile battleship (BBGN) programme would be about USD 275 billion in 2026 dollars (EUR 238 billion) over the 2027–2056 period. The first ship would cost about USD 23.4 billion, with subsequent ships of the class averaging a cost of USD 18 billion, giving the total cost of around USD 275 billion for 15 battleships built between 2028 and 2056. This is about 13% more expensive than the CBO’s estimates for the original conventionally powered battleships, which it pegged at USD 21.3 billion for the lead ship and an average of USD 15.9 billion for the 14 follow-on ships in the class.
Before the US Navy announced its plans for the new battleships to be nuclear powered, it had specified a design that would have a full-load displacement of 35,000 tons (31,751 tonnes) or more, a length of 840 to 880 ft (256 to 268 m), and a sustained speed in excess of 30 knots (55.6 km/h).
This would make it the largest surface combatant in the world and larger than any surface combatant built for the US Navy since the Second World War, the CBO noted. It would be more than three-and-a-half times the size of the US Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer and more than twice the size of the navy’s Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyer.
Regarding armament, “The battleship’s main battery would include missile cells for anti-ship, anti-air, and land-attack missiles and, presumably, the ship’s nuclear cruise missiles,” the CBO stated. “It would also include launchers for hypersonic Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) missiles. Other elements would include large lasers, a rail gun and a variety of defensive systems such as guns, smaller missiles, decoys, and optical dazzlers intended to counter and disrupt unmanned aerial systems. If some of those technologies were not available when construction began, the navy could still build the ship, reserving space and power for their later installation.”
The BBGN’s capacity for conventional missiles would also exceed that of most other navy ships, the CBO noted. It would be expected to carry 128 Mark 41 vertical launch system (VLS) cells in addition to four CPS missile tubes, each of which would contain three missiles, for a total of 12.
While the total number of BBGNs that the US Navy would buy remains uncertain, when the programme was announced the Trump Administration said it would begin immediately with two ships, to be followed by eight more, while in a presentation at the 2026 symposium of the Surface Navy Association, the US Navy stated that the programme would ultimately include 15 to 25 ships. The 2027 shipbuilding plan calls for the construction of 15 ships over the next 30 years: one in 2028, one in 2030, one in 2031, and then one every other year through to 2056.
In terms of where the ships would be built, and in which yards, the CBO pointed out that while Bath Iron Works in Maine and Ingalls Shipbuilding in Mississippi have built all of the navy’s large surface combatants over the past 40 years, neither is certified by the navy to perform nuclear-power-related work in ship construction.
Moreover, both yards are already having trouble keeping up with the current shipbuilding schedules, with deliveries of Arleigh Burke-class destroyers for which Congress has already appropriated funding being delayed by five years on average. The CBO noted that, according to the US Navy’s budget justification documents, the average amount of time needed to deliver a destroyer after its funding has been appropriated is now 11 years, whereas between 2000 and 2009 that average was five years.
In May 2026 senior US Navy leaders said that, although many shipyards – especially Bath and Ingalls – would be involved in building parts, sections and modules for the new battleship, the final assembly of the ship would be performed by Newport News Shipbuilding. This is the only US new-construction shipyard already certified for work on nuclear-powered surface ships, as the yard is currently building Gerald R Ford-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers as well as doing production work on the US Navy’s nuclear-powered submarines. However, Newport News Shipbuilding is already behind schedule on those carrier and submarine programmes.
Although the US Navy’s 2027 shipbuilding plan would make significant changes with respect to the production of surface combatants – adding the battleship programme, cancelling the DDG(X) (Next-Generation Guided-Missile Destroyer) programme and calling for smaller frigates to be built at more shipyards – the overall tonnage in construction would still be significantly higher.
“Over the 30-year periods covered by the respective plans, the total tonnage of surface combatants that shipyards would need to produce would be 12% greater under the 2027 plan than under the 2025 plan,” the CBO observed, adding, “Compared with the 2025 plan, the 2027 plan would more than double the tonnage of large surface combatants produced by 2035 and would increase that tonnage by about 60% overall over the next 30 years. … Accommodating such a large increase in the production of large surface combatants could be a challenge for the shipbuilding industry.”
Another issue that arises regarding the US Navy’s BBGN plans is a doctrinal one. Just at a time when multiple Western naval forces, such as the UK Royal Navy, are looking to increase the survivability of their naval power by disaggregating it – for example by using manned ‘motherships’ in conjunction with multiple unmanned effector platforms – the US Navy appears to be colluding with President Trump’s presumed assumption that ‘bigger is better’ to plan the construction of its biggest surface combatant since the Second World War. Such a policy of ‘putting all its eggs in one basket’ could ultimately leave the US Navy with a ship that, in a high-intensity conflict, would be a veritable magnet for hostile hypersonic missiles.
In an article published on 3 March 2026, Warsight quoted a 23 December 2025 article published by the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank asserted that Trump’s battleship “will never sail”.
The article asserted that the Trump-class battleship “will take years to design, cost USD 9 billion each to build [that estimate was lower the the CBO’s and before the nuclear propulsion plans] and contravene the navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower”, predicting that “A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”
Since then, however, the US Navy has doubled down on its battleship plans, notably with the intention to use nuclear propulsion. Although, over the longer term, this could lead to costs savings compared to conventionally fuelled powerplants, these savings would only be realised if a sizeable BBGN fleet was put into service and operated over many years.
The CBO noted in its report that, despite plans for construction to start in 2028, “the battleship is in the early stages of its design, and many uncertainties could affect the program’s ultimate cost. Some could lead to costs that are lower than CBO’s estimate, and some could result in costs that are higher.”
What the CBO did not address, however, is whether the navy’s new nuclear-powered battleship should ever be built at all.
