At a recent hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, the panel’s chairman, Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., revealed the extent to which, he says, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro had not been honest with Congress on the very significant delays and cost overruns facing naval shipbuilding.
Del Toro testified Sept. 19 on the newly revealed cost shortfalls for the Virginia-class submarine program, which has a $1.95 billion shortfall this year and a projected $17 billion shortfall over the next six years.
Calvert said the Navy has not been honest with Congress and appears to have known for at least 18 months about these budget issues it only just revealed.
Congress was just notified a few weeks ago of these substantial shortfalls, and it appears that it was made aware primarily because the fight over the continuing resolution stopgap spending bill acted as a forcing function for the Department of the Navy.
As Calvert put it: “For too long, this committee has been put in a position of asking what the Navy is hiding behind the curtain. It’s time to pull down that curtain altogether.”
The California lawmaker confronted Del Toro on the long list of problems identified in the Navy’s own 45-day shipbuilding review, including problems relating to design maturity, first-of-class transitions, production, design workforce, acquisition and contract strategy, supply chain, skilled workforce, and government workforce.
This is not the first time this year that Del Toro has found himself at the center of controversy.
Just a few months ago, an Office of Special Counsel found that Del Toro had violated the Hatch Act by asserting personal political campaign views while on official business in Britain. So far, there is no indication that Del Toro will face any consequences for that violation.
Congress may have to get creative in acting to keep the Navy and the shipbuilders on schedule and on budget. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy is already larger than the U.S. Navy numerically, and Chinese shipbuilding is many times over larger than that of the United States in capacity.
The U.S. Navy needs ships, but America’s shipyards lack capacity, are beset by maintenance and construction delays, and suffer from labor shortages.
Congress may want to consider such drastic measures as fines imposed on shipbuilders that fail to meet deadlines as a way to incentivize those companies to invest more in labor and infrastructure and to deliver ships on time.
In some cases, welders at the shipyards make less than cashiers. Shipyards are going to need to increase wages to attract and retain workers. The Navy has proposed a pay restructuring called Shipyard Accountability and Workforce Support (SAWS), an initiative that bears consideration, although the shipyards need to be paying their workers more, regardless.
Del Toro should spend more time addressing the badly mismanaged shipbuilding programs of the Department of Defense and less time engaging in partisan discourse.
The mismanagement of Virginia-class submarine shipbuilding puts at risk the long-term plans for one of the programs most critical to deterring China in the Indo-Pacific.
It is imperative that the Navy be honest with congressional committees tasked with oversight, so that Congress can have confidence that the investments of the taxpayers in the future of the fleet are being well-spent.