We’re publishing this ahead of Hudson Institute’s September 16 gathering on the SHIPS for America Act’s prospects, deliberately. Every name in this piece — Sen. Young, Bryan Clark, Brent Sadler, and the industry and labor voices joining them — will be in that room discussing exactly the questions this report raises. We’d rather put our read on the record first and let it be tested by the people actually doing the work than publish a victory lap after the fact. If we’ve got the balance wrong, we want to hear it there. If we’ve got it right, we hope it moves the conversation in the room toward the accountability this moment actually calls for.
Who You’ll Be Hearing From on September 16
For readers who want to follow the event itself, here’s who’s in the room and why they matter to the questions this piece raises:
Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) — Co-lead of the SHIPS for America Act, returning to Hudson to address the bill’s odds in what’s being called this Congress’s “homestretch.” His read on the September conference timeline is the single most consequential data point this piece’s “In Motion” section is waiting on.
Joe Russell — Deputy Legislative Director for Sen. Mark Kelly, the bill’s other lead sponsor. The clearest inside view on where the Maritime Security Trust Fund actually stands in negotiations.
Bryan Clark — Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, Hudson Institute. The connective tissue across SFAA, FLEETS Now, and the Navy’s own Golden Fleet plan; moderating the day’s discussion.
Brent Sadler — Senior Research Fellow, Naval Warfare and Advanced Technology, Heritage Foundation. A 26-year Navy veteran and former nuclear submariner; the sharpest read available on whether the fleet-size numbers this piece flags as stalled are likely to turn, and when.
Michael Roberts — Senior Fellow, Center for Defense Concepts and Technology. Focused on the commercial-shipbuilding side of the bill — the Strategic Commercial Fleet Program mechanics behind the 250-ship target.
Todd Tucker — Director of Industrial Policy & Trade, Roosevelt Institute. An industrial-policy perspective on whether investments like Factory 4 can outpace the broader waterfront erosion this piece cites from MARAD’s own data.
David Sullivan — General Vice President, Eastern Territory, International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers. The labor voice missing from most of these conversations — directly relevant to the wage-and-conditions workforce argument this piece raises.
Chris McVickers — Chief Financial Officer, Fairbanks Morse. A finance-side read on whether capital is actually moving into the industrial base, or still sitting on the sidelines as the skeptics argue.
Bleu Hilburn — VP Government Business Development, Crowley Maritime Corp. Established commercial-shipping industry perspective on cargo preference enforcement and fleet expansion.
Larry Ryder — SVP Business Development, Naval Programs, Hanwha Defense USA. A shipbuilder’s-eye view on distributed shipbuilding and where the Navy’s 10-to-50-percent goal actually stands on the shop floor.
Ian Bennitt — Senior Director of Government Relations and Shipbuilding, Saronic. Ben Cipperly — Chief Strategy Officer, Havoc AI. Both represent the newer, autonomous-vessel side of the industrial base — the “we can build this now” posture this piece’s “What We’ve Learned” section points to.
We’ll be watching for direct answers on the appropriations timeline, the fleet-size trendline, and the workforce diagnosis — the same three items on our own scorecard below.
Three years ago is when we started Americans for a Stronger Navy, because the country had stopped noticing its own vulnerability at sea. That was the easy part to fix — awareness. The harder question was always going to be: once people noticed, would anything actually move?
Three years later, we can say something we couldn’t say when we started: yes, something is moving. Not everything. Not fast enough. But the shift from “recognizing the problem” to “building the fix” is real, and it’s worth an honest accounting — the wins that are locked in, the ones still being fought for, and the ones that will only be real if the country holds people to them.
What’s Actually Law and Funded
Two things in this list are not proposals. They happened.
Executive Order 14269. Signed April 9, 2025, “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance” directed a whole-of-government Maritime Action Plan, mandated an assessment of tools like the Defense Production Act to rebuild the maritime industrial base, and created the framework for a national Maritime Security Advisor [1]. The White House released the resulting Maritime Action Plan in February 2026 [2]. This is a standing directive, not a bill waiting on a vote.
The FY2027 30-Year Shipbuilding Plan. The Department of the Navy’s “Golden Fleet” plan requests $65.8 billion in shipbuilding funding for FY2027 alone, targeting a battle force of roughly 450 manned and unmanned vessels by FY2031, up from 291 ships today [3][4]. Worth being precise here: this is a budget request, not an appropriation. Congress still has to fund it. But the plan itself — including the goal of moving distributed shipbuilding work from about 10 percent to 50 percent of Navy projects across non-traditional industrial sites — is now the Navy’s official position, not a think-tank white paper [4].
Factory 4, Muscle Shoals, Alabama. This $2.4 billion public-private facility (roughly $900 million in federal investment layered with $1.5 billion in private capital) opened in March 2026 and is already producing components for Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines [5]. It’s worth being specific about what it is: a submarine-component manufacturing hub, not a general hull-construction yard. Navy leadership has said it’s the first of three planned facilities meant to relieve industrial bottlenecks [5]. One factory doesn’t fix the industrial base. But it’s steel in the ground, not a slide in a briefing.
“This factory is the first of three facilities designed to address the most critical bottlenecks in the maritime industrial base.” — Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan [5]
What’s Still In Motion — and Why That Matters
This is the part of the report that’s easy to get wrong, and we’d rather get it right than get it impressive.
The SHIPS for America Act (S. 1541). This bill, led by Sens. Mark Kelly and Todd Young with Reps. Trent Kelly and John Garamendi, would establish a Maritime Security Trust Fund and a Strategic Commercial Fleet Program aimed at growing the U.S.-flagged international fleet by 250 ships over a decade [6]. It has genuine bipartisan authorship and real momentum. It is not law. It’s been reintroduced, it has committee support, and companion legislation (the FLEETS Now Act, the Ready Reserve Force Modernization Accountability Act) is moving alongside it — but as of this writing, the path forward runs through a House-Senate conference expected this fall, likely bundled with the FY27 NDAA [7]. Anyone who tells you this fund already exists is ahead of the facts. It’s close. It isn’t done.
The workforce and unmanned-systems provisions — folding uncrewed surface and undersea vehicles into official force-structure procurement counts, and standing up maritime academy and mariner-credentialing incentives — are part of the same legislative and budgetary picture: real proposals with real support, still working their way through appropriations rather than sitting on the books as settled policy.
Why the distinction matters for this movement specifically: our credibility with the people who actually read this stuff — Hill staffers, the Midrats and USNI crowd, the shipyard workforce we claim to speak for — depends on us being the group that doesn’t round up. Overstating “passed” when the real status is “introduced” costs us the next argument we need to win.
What the Skeptics Are Saying
An honest progress report has to sit with the people who don’t think there’s much progress to report. Three worth taking seriously:
The fleet number moved the wrong way. WorkBoat’s own progress check in January 2026 cited Center for Maritime Strategy data showing the U.S.-flagged oceangoing fleet actually fell to 178 cargo ships, about 0.57 percent of world tonnage, even after the executive order and the SHIPS Act push began [8]. If the goal is closing the gap with a 5,500-ship Chinese fleet, that’s the one number that should be climbing, and as of this writing it hasn’t.
The money hasn’t landed yet. At a February 2026 maritime finance conference, one shipyard-side capital advisor put it bluntly: interest is real, but results are not [9].
“Tangible results to date – no.” [9]
That’s a financing-industry read on the same gap this report flags in its “In Motion” section — plans and requests are not yet appropriated dollars or delivered ships.
The industrial base has kept eroding underneath the good news. A MARAD report — reportedly held back internally for nine months before its release — found that 27 to 40 percent of U.S. waterfront industrial facilities have disappeared over the past twenty years [10]. New facilities like Factory 4 are real, but they’re being built against a backdrop of continued, not yet reversed, decline elsewhere on the waterfront.
The workforce fix may be aimed at the wrong pool. A Wharton graduate student who has studied U.S., Chinese, Japanese, and Korean yards — and who served as a junior officer with Navy construction units in Asia — argues the real workforce question isn’t why we can’t recruit 150,000 new kids into shipbuilding, but why the 30 million Americans already in construction, manufacturing, and transportation refuse shipyard jobs [11]. His answer: shipyard work sits on the wrong side of the toil-versus-earnings line compared to what construction and auto work now offer, because pay and conditions in those industries improved over the past 30 years in ways shipbuilding didn’t. If that diagnosis holds, academy incentives and credentialing streamlining address supply for new entrants, not the wage-and-safety gap keeping the existing skilled workforce away — which means our own scorecard needs to track pay and working-condition trends at the yards, not just enrollment and hiring counts.
We’re not citing these to talk ourselves out of the progress documented above — the EO, the budget request, and Factory 4 are real regardless of what the skeptics think. We’re citing them because a movement that only quotes its own wins isn’t one the public should trust, and because these are exactly the kind of numbers our own scorecard needs to keep watching.
The Accountability Scorecard: What We’re Watching Next
Building consensus on the problem was phase one. This is phase two — and it means holding institutions to the numbers they’ve put on paper, including our own.
1. Appropriation, not just authorization. Does the FY2027 defense package actually fund the $65.8 billion shipbuilding request, and does the SHIPS for America Act’s Maritime Security Trust Fund get enacted in the September conference — or slip again?
2. Yard output versus dollars in. Distributed shipbuilding is supposed to move from 10 percent to 50 percent of Navy projects. We’ll be tracking whether ship deliveries and on-time performance at key yards actually move, not just whether the money shows up.
3. Real people in real jobs — and what those jobs actually pay. Factory 4 promises up to 1,000 skilled manufacturing jobs [5]. Maritime academy incentives and mariner credentialing reforms are supposed to rebuild the workforce pipeline. But if the diagnosis above is right, the test isn’t just enrollment and hiring numbers a year from now — it’s whether entry-level shipyard pay and working conditions actually close the gap with construction and manufacturing, since that’s the gap keeping the existing skilled workforce away in the first place.
We’ll publish updates against these three benchmarks as the facts come in — credit where it’s earned, and a flag where it isn’t.
What We’ve Learned — and What We Actually See Improving
Numbers and bill statuses are one way to measure three years. Here’s the other way: what’s changed in the room, not just on paper.
The conversation itself has moved. Three years ago, “why does the Navy matter” was still a question we had to answer from scratch, on almost every call, with almost every audience. We don’t get that question much anymore. The “who pays” framing — the idea that national will has to turn into budgets, budgets into priorities, priorities into behavior, and behavior into readiness — used to be a hard sell. Now it’s closer to common ground, even across people who disagree about almost everything else in this fight.
The bipartisan coalition is more durable than we expected. A Navy-veteran-turned-astronaut Democrat and a Naval Academy Republican leading the same bill together isn’t a coincidence three years in — it’s a sign the “national security, not partisan security” framing we’ve pushed from the start actually took. That coalition surviving a change in administration, an election cycle, and a government funding fight is itself a data point.
Industry is showing up before Washington asks it to. The volunteered testimony, the willingness of yards, suppliers, and even new entrants like the autonomous-vessel builders to say “we can do this now, fund us or not” — that’s a different posture than three years ago, when the industrial base mostly waited to be told what to build.
What we’ve learned, plainly: awareness moves faster than appropriations, and appropriations move faster than delivered ships. Each stage takes longer than the one before it, and it would be a mistake to assume this pace picks up just because the last stage did. We also learned that the “builders not critics” posture works better than we expected at keeping doors open on both sides of the aisle — and that it only keeps working if we stay honest about what hasn’t happened yet, which is exactly why the sections above separate the real from the pending.
Where We Go From Here
We’re not critics of this effort. We’re builders who happen to think the public deserves the real state of play, not the highlight reel. The country spent two decades not noticing its own maritime decline. It would be a strange way to fix that to start exaggerating the recovery. The honest version of this story is good enough to tell on its own — and it’s the only version worth standing behind a year from now.
References
[1] Executive Order 14269, “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance,” The White House, April 9, 2025.
[2] Seward & Kissel, “White House Releases Maritime Action Plan Following April 9, 2025 Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance Executive Order,” February 2026.
[3] The Defense Post, “US Navy Unveils 30-Year ‘Golden Fleet’ Modernization Plan to Reach 450+ Ships,” May 2026.
[4] ExecutiveGov, “Navy Unveils FY2027 Shipbuilding Plan,” 2026.
[5] U.S. Navy Office of Information / Navy.mil, “Advanced Shipbuilding ‘Factory of the Future’ Opens in Alabama,” March 20, 2026.
[6] Cozen O’Connor, “The SHIPS for America Act,” May 7, 2025; Rep. John Garamendi press release, April 30, 2025.
[7] Jones Walker LLP, “Update on the SHIPS for America Act.”
[8] WorkBoat, “Gauging Progress on US Shipbuilding After Trump’s Pledge,” January 28, 2026.
[9] Seatrade Maritime, “Momentum Slows on Trump’s US Maritime Action Plans,” February 13, 2026.
[10] Craig Hooper, Forbes, “MARAD: 27-40% U.S. Waterfront Industrial Facilities Gone In 20 Years,” March 3, 2026.
[11] The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Why Don’t Construction and Factory Workers Want to Build Ships?” interview with Gary Kim, September 2026.