Donald Trump arrives for a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Dec. 22, 2025, where he announced the Navy would build a new Trump-class battleship. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds, AFP/Getty Images via TNS)
Congress has received its first internal analysis of the proposed “Trump-class” battleships, which are the linchpin of the president’s “Golden Fleet” plan for the Navy’s future.
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service released its report on Tuesday, outlining the battleship project and including a list of suggested questions for Congress on whether the ships are needed, cost-effective and meet overall Navy strategic goals.
The analysis comes the week after the Congressional Budget Office pegged the likely price of the largest non-aircraft carrier surface ship that the Navy has built since World War II at up to $22 billion for the first ship. Later ships would cost up to $12.7 billion, according to the CBO.
The proposed battleships are designated “BBG(X)“: BB for battleship, G for guided-missile, and X for an unfinished design.
The CRS report notes that the ships would not follow the direction of aircraft carriers in using nuclear propulsion and would have a variety of current and future weapons options.
“BBG(X) would be conventionally powered (i.e., “fossil-fueled”) ships armed with a combination of missiles, guns, lasers and other weapons that would be greater in aggregate than the combination of weapons on the Navy’s current cruisers and destroyers,” the report said.
A new Navy schematic of the proposed “Trump-class” battleship. (Congressional Research Service)
CRS said the Navy envisions building 15 to 25 BBG(X)s as part of the “forthcoming” Golden Fleet plan that would replace the current plan to build a 381-ship Navy.
The idea of a new, large surface combat vessel has been praised and derided in naval circles since President Donald Trump first announced it during a Dec. 22 news conference at Mar-a-lago, the president’s private club in Florida.
“They’ll be the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” Trump said.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle, speaking at the Surface Navy Association National Symposium last week in Arlington, Va., said the battleship was part of a change in Navy thinking.
“Why is the Navy building that? Well, everything’s an evolution,” Caudle said, according to Navy Times. “If I want to shoot 100 things from 100 things, or I want to shoot 100 things from one thing, which is harder?”
Caudle called the proposed battleships “badass” and said they would enable multiple missions thanks to their higher payload, speed, and the ability to use multiple weapons systems simultaneously with a single command and control system aboard a battleship.
Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote for the center that he believed the ship would never get off the drawing board.
“This ship will never sail,” Cancian said. “It will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build, and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower. A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”
China’s Global Times, a government-aligned newspaper, interviewed Zhang Junshe, a naval analyst with China’s Navy, who said the large size of the battleship would make it more vulnerable and an easier target, especially when full of munitions.
BBG(X)s would be the first battleships procured by the Navy since World War II and would be larger and more heavily armed than any cruiser or destroyer procured by the Navy since the war. The first BBG(X) would reportedly be procured in the early 2030s.
BBG(X)s would be 840 feet to 880 feet long and have a full load displacement of more than 35,000 tons.
The report notes that it is lighter than the last battleships operated by the Navy — the World War II-era Iowa-class, which had a fully loaded displacement of 57,000 tons.
In comparison, the Navy’s current heaviest ships are the Zumwalt-class destroyers at 16,000 tons, the Ticonderoga-class cruisers at 9,600 tons, and the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers at 9,100 tons. The largest ships in the Navy are aircraft carriers, 10 Nimitz class and one Gerald R. Ford class, with a displacement of over 100,000 tons.
A planned future guided missile destroyer, the DDG(X), would have a displacement of 14,500 tons. The report said the battleship program was expected to benefit from a shift of resources away from the new destroyer to the new battleship.
“The Navy reportedly intends to suspend work on the DDG(X) program as a consequence of starting the BBG(X) program,” the report said.
CRS said the Navy reportedly plans to issue competitive awards to one or more shipbuilders to build BBG(X)s. It identified General Dynamics Bath Iron Works of Bath, Maine; Huntington Ingalls Industries Ingalls Shipbuilding of Pascagoula, Miss.; and Huntington Ingalls Industries Newport News Shipbuilding of Newport News, Va., as the only current U.S. shipyards that could handle the construction.
CRS said the House and Senate have several potential questions to ask about the battleship project, including:
Why has the Trump Administration proposed a new class of battleships?
What analysis of alternatives to the battleship were considered, such as the previously planned DDG (X) guided missile destroyers?
Would new technologies that the Navy states are to be incorporated into the BBG(X) design — including an electromagnetic railgun and higher-power lasers — be mature enough by the early 2030s to be incorporated into BBG(X)s?
Would battleships complement the existing fleet and be a cost-effective addition?
What steps in the Defense Department acquisition process, if any, were set aside to enable the initiation of the BBG(X) program in December 2025?
Would BBG(X)s be consistent with the Navy’s Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) concept, which calls for spreading the Navy’s sensors and weapons across a wider array of ships and aircraft, to avoid “putting too many eggs into one basket”?
What impact would BBG(X)s have on available funding for other Navy program priorities?
