The U.S. Navy is conducting a formal review of the Ford-class aircraft carrier program that could determine whether the service continues building the most expensive warships ever constructed or pivots to a different approach entirely. The review, which officials expect to complete by May 2026, is examining the design, cost, and future viability of the class, and cancellation of planned ships has not been ruled out, the Associated Press reported.
Four Ford-class carriers have been authorized by Congress so far. The lead ship, USS Gerald R. Ford, was commissioned in 2017 after years of delays and cost overruns that pushed its price tag beyond $13 billion. Three more hulls, CVN-79 (John F. Kennedy), CVN-80 (Enterprise), and CVN-81 (Doris Miller), are in various stages of construction at Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding facility in Virginia, the only shipyard in the country capable of building nuclear-powered carriers.
A program defined by cost overruns and technical risk
The Ford class was designed to be a generational leap over the Nimitz-class carriers it is replacing. The Navy chose to develop and install multiple first-of-its-kind technologies simultaneously: an Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EALS) to replace steam catapults, an Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG) for recovering aircraft, a new dual-band radar suite, and a redesigned A1B nuclear reactor. That decision created what auditors call “concurrency risk,” building the ship while still developing and testing its core systems.
A 2013 Government Accountability Office audit, titled “Ford-Class Carriers: Lead Ship Testing and Reliability Shortfalls Will Limit Initial Fleet Capabilities,” documented how that concurrency produced cascading delays and reliability failures. The GAO assessment found that the lead ship could not demonstrate full operational capability at delivery because key systems had not been adequately tested.
A follow-up GAO report in 2017 examined cost estimating for the follow-on ships and concluded the Navy needed more frequent and more accurate projections to avoid repeating the budget problems that plagued CVN-78. That report included recommendations aimed at improving the reliability of cost data presented to Congress, a direct acknowledgment that lawmakers had been making funding decisions based on incomplete or optimistic figures.
What the current review is examining
The Navy has confirmed the review is active but has not publicly released the specific upgrade options, design alternatives, or cost scenarios under consideration. No official terms-of-reference document or review charter has been made available. What has been reported comes from statements to the press rather than formal Pentagon publications.
The scope of potential changes remains unclear. Options could range from modular upgrades to existing designs, to stripped-down variants that eliminate some of the Ford’s more troubled systems, to a fundamentally different ship concept. At the far end of the spectrum, the Navy could cap the class at fewer hulls than originally planned and redirect shipbuilding funds toward other platforms, including smaller carriers, unmanned surface vessels, or extended service life for the remaining Nimitz-class ships.
Cost projections for any redesign are absent from the public record. The 2017 GAO report remains the most detailed independent cost analysis of the follow-on ships, though the Congressional Budget Office has published more recent shipbuilding cost estimates in its annual analyses of the Navy’s long-range shipbuilding plans. Updated per-unit cost figures also appear in the Navy’s annual budget justification documents submitted to Congress.
No new GAO or CBO audit has been published that evaluates Ford-class reliability or cost performance in light of the ship’s actual operational deployments. That gap matters. The Ford completed its first combat deployment in 2023-2024, operating in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Israel-Hamas conflict. Performance data from that deployment and subsequent operations could significantly alter the cost-benefit calculus, but that data has not been made public in an independent audit format.
Congressional scrutiny and industrial base concerns
Congressional oversight of the Ford class has intensified in recent sessions. During 118th Congress hearings on the fiscal year 2025 defense authorization request, Navy and Department of Defense officials testified on construction status, block-buy procurement savings, and the health of the carrier industrial base. A Senate Armed Services Committee transcript includes operational metrics such as deployment days and nautical miles logged by the Ford, along with prepared statements defending the program’s value.
Those metrics, while useful, tell only part of the story. They demonstrate the ship can deploy and conduct flight operations. They do not address whether it can do so at a sustainable cost or with the reliability the fleet requires over a 50-year service life. Navy leaders appearing before appropriations committees have institutional incentives to present their programs favorably, and claimed savings from block-buy procurement strategies deserve the same scrutiny the GAO applied to earlier cost estimates.
The industrial base question looms over any decision to scale back the program. Newport News Shipbuilding employs tens of thousands of workers on carrier construction, and the specialized workforce and infrastructure required to build nuclear-powered warships cannot be easily reconstituted once lost. Lawmakers from Virginia and other states with carrier-related supply chains have historically pushed back hard against proposals to slow or cancel construction, arguing that gaps in production erode skills and drive up costs for future ships.
The broader defense spending environment
The Ford-class review is unfolding against a backdrop of intensifying pressure on Pentagon spending. The Trump administration has signaled interest in identifying savings across major defense programs, and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has drawn attention to high-cost weapons systems. While no public DOGE directive has specifically targeted the Ford class, the political environment has made expensive legacy programs more vulnerable to scrutiny than at any point in recent memory.
At the same time, the Navy faces competing demands for shipbuilding dollars. The Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program, the service’s top acquisition priority, is consuming an increasing share of the shipbuilding budget. The Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan must also account for new frigates, destroyers, attack submarines, and unmanned platforms. Every dollar committed to a Ford-class carrier is a dollar unavailable for those other programs, a tradeoff that becomes harder to justify if the carriers continue to exceed their cost targets.
Signals to watch as the Navy’s carrier review wraps up
The key development in the coming weeks is whether the Navy’s review produces a public report or whether its findings are folded quietly into budget requests. If the review leads to changes in the fiscal year 2027 shipbuilding plan, those changes will appear first in budget documents submitted to Congress, likely accompanied by updated cost estimates that can be compared against the benchmarks the GAO established years ago.
The absence of a fresh independent audit covering post-deployment performance is the most significant gap in the current evidence base. Any new GAO or CBO analysis would substantially clarify whether the Ford-class design has matured into a dependable platform or remains a high-cost gamble.
For now, the Navy appears to be hedging. By acknowledging that cancellation of future hulls is an option, leadership signals to Congress and contractors that continued funding depends on demonstrable progress in reliability and affordability. By emphasizing the operational achievements of the lead ship in testimony, the service underscores that the carriers already built or under construction will remain central to U.S. naval strategy. How that tension resolves, between billions already spent and billions yet to be committed, will shape American sea power for the rest of the century.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
