Politics & Government · The Record
Trump memo bars iterative design changes on covered mature Navy designs, then orders a plan to replace CVN-81's catapults
A White House fact sheet blames Navy cost growth on overly complex designs and iterative design changes. The memorandum it announces forbids such changes within listed programs - and directs a plan to swap a carrier's launch systems for steam and hydraulics.
A White House fact sheet published this month names design churn as a principal reason American warships arrive late and cost more than planned. Navy shipbuilding, the fact sheet states, has run into setbacks "stemming from overly complex designs and iterative design change procedures, which have resulted in cost growth, delays, and cancellations." The National Security Presidential Memorandum that the fact sheet announces carries an instruction of its own: a plan to take the electromagnetic catapults and weapons elevators out of an aircraft carrier already in construction and put steam and hydraulics in their place.
The memorandum was signed by President Donald Trump (R) and posted among the White House's presidential actions for August 2026. Its purpose, as the fact sheet describes it, is to fix long-running problems in Navy shipbuilding and ship repair and to restore capacity and competition to the maritime industrial base. The same fact sheet sets out the case for urgency: large order backlogs across six major Navy shipbuilding programs, a commercial shipbuilding sector it describes as not globally competitive, and an industrial base it calls atrophied, with adjacent supplier bases diminished alongside it.
That argument is continuous with a promise the document quotes back to itself. During the March 2025 joint address to Congress, the fact sheet notes, the President pledged to "resurrect the American shipbuilding industry, including commercial shipbuilding and military shipbuilding." The fact sheet also credits him with the largest increase in naval strength since the Reagan administration and with the largest investments in the Coast Guard in the service's history - characterizations the document asserts without citing a count behind either.
The carrier instruction has an antecedent in the trade press, though a thinly documented one. Breaking Defense's report on the memorandum carries the remark, "When we build aircraft carriers, it's steam for the catapults and it's hydraulic for the elevators," alongside a stated intention to sign an order to that effect. The captured text of that report, as reviewed here, neither names the speaker nor dates the remark, and this piece does not treat it as establishing when the idea was first raised or by whom.
What the memorandum itself directs is narrower than the fact sheet's summary of it. The document instructs the Secretary of War, in consultation with the Secretary of the Navy, to provide the President "a plan on the required measures to replace the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System and Advanced Weapons Elevators with steam and hydraulic systems for the construction of CVN-81, including timelines and resourcing requirements." The fact sheet's shorter formulation - that the memorandum directs the Secretary of War to replace the systems during CVN-81's construction - runs a step ahead of the memorandum's own verb, which orders a plan and attaches a resourcing question to it.
The same memorandum also sets a rule against exactly this kind of intervention. Within the programs it lists, the Navy is barred from imposing iterative design changes on the original mature parent designs, and no departure from a parent design may be made without the approval of the Secretary of War, in consultation with the Secretary of the Navy, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. The reorganization ordered at Naval Sea Systems Command is written to the same end: to prevent NAVSEA from imposing redesigns or iterative design changes on original mature parent designs, to eliminate competing priorities among its components - which the document says often produce delayed, cost-prohibitive or overly complex vessels and systems - and to introduce results-based accountability for its leadership, measured by speed of delivery.
Whether the carrier plan collides with that prohibition depends on a list the captured text does not reproduce. The bar reaches the programs listed in that section of the memorandum, and the excerpt reviewed here does not enumerate them, so whether CVN-81 sits inside that set is not settled by the document as reviewed. What is on the page either way is one memorandum that treats mid-course design change as the disease in one place and commissions a study of one in another.
On the diagnosis, the administration has independent support. GAO-25-108136, the Government Accountability Office's report on Navy shipbuilding, finds that the Navy continues to set extensive and detailed requirements for vessels many years before they are fielded, and to lock in major commitments to construct ships before design stability is achieved. The audit cites the frigate program, where construction began in August 2022 without a completed functional design to demonstrate that the design was stable, and the Columbia class submarine program, where cost and schedule risks GAO identified in 2017 have since been realized in at least a year's delay to the first submarine's delivery and hundreds of millions of dollars in additional cost. Shipyards, the report adds, are working with aging facilities, space limits and a workforce whose experienced hands are hard to replace.
GAO also supplies a measuring stick for the fact sheet's fleet claims. Since 2015 the office has made 90 recommendations to the Navy on shipbuilding acquisition practices and outcomes; 30 have been fully or partially addressed and 60 remain unaddressed. Its blunter finding is a count: the Navy has no more ships today than when it released its first 30-year shipbuilding plan in 2003, and it has failed to grow the fleet as planned over the past two decades. Marginal changes within the existing acquisition structures, the report concludes, are unlikely to produce the foundational shift needed.
The remedy carries an industrial-base problem of its own, and it is the same problem the fact sheet names. Restoring steam lines to at least the catapults would require extensive redesign of the ship, Breaking Defense reported, and the Navy has not bought a steam catapult in more than 20 years - long enough that suppliers are unlikely to be able to build them without substantial up-front investment and the time to stand production lines back up. The report also carries the assessment that "With nearly 50% of production complete, changing course now would introduce significant cost, schedule, and integration risks." On that reporting, the proven-technology fix would have to be re-industrialized before it could be installed.
A second tension sits between the promise and the mechanism. The stated goal is a resurrected American industry, but part of the route there runs through foreign yards: qualifying shipbuilders would be temporarily permitted to build up to two ships in their parent shipyards for quick-turnaround delivery, on conditions that they simultaneously build a new US shipyard or take ownership or a majority equity position in an existing one, build all ships after the first two in the United States, hire and train an American citizen workforce, and license their proprietary techniques and technologies to the American yards. Under 10 U.S.C. 8679(b), the memorandum records the President's determination that it is in the national security interest to increase domestic shipbuilding capacity using the October 9, 2025 memorandum of understanding between the United States and Finland on medium icebreaker construction as a model. The fact sheet separately notes an October 2025 presidential memorandum authorizing construction of up to four Arctic Security Cutters abroad.
Several items make the memorandum checkable rather than merely arguable. The plan for CVN-81's launch systems is owed to the President with timelines and resourcing requirements attached. The fifth naval shipyard - the first in over 80 years, by the fact sheet's count - is to expand submarine and carrier repair capacity, and the memorandum sets out where to look for it: locations proximate to the Pacific Fleet, including the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii and the US territories, with drydock capacity sufficient for two decades of fast attack submarine growth. The document also asks for resourcing to hold at least one spare ship set for the Los Angeles, Virginia, Seawolf, Ohio and Columbia classes. All of it is to be carried out consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations, which puts Congress in the path of every line.
Analysis, on the evidence above: the supplier gap is the near-term test of the reversal. If no contract award for a steam catapult appears in public Department of War contract announcements by December 31, 2026, the swap will still be a planning document rather than a purchase - and GAO's 60 open recommendations will remain the more precise gauge of whether the design-stability problem both documents describe is actually being fixed.