President Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Navy stressed the need for the department to have “a sense of urgency” as it relates to reforming the way it builds ships, which has been a long-standing issue for the service branch.
John Phelan, a prominent GOP campaign donor and businessman whom Trump picked to lead the Navy back in November, appeared in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.
“I think what is missing from what I can see is a sense of urgency,” Phelan said of the Navy’s shipbuilding efforts. “We’re just going along and everybody — it’s kumbaya. It’s almost as if you’re waiting for a crisis to happen, to ignite things. I think in the business of warfare, that’s a dangerous place to be. So I think why the president selected me is I will bring a sense of urgency to this. I will bring a sense of accountability to this.”
He said the president has texted him multiple times, “sometimes after one in the morning,” complaining about “rusty ships or ships in a yard, asking” Phelan what he’s doing about them, though he’s not yet in the position.
“I don’t think I could say shipbuilding enough times in terms of the President’s priorities as he’s made it very clear. I think what is missing from what I can see is a sense of urgency,” Phelan said.
His comments come the same day the Government Accountability Agency released a report on the Navy’s approach to shipbuilding and ship repair that portrayed a picture similar to what Phelan laid out to lawmakers.
The conclusions of the report found that the “problems in Navy shipbuilding and repair have remained relatively unchanged over the past decades,” which is that they’re not reaching cost and scheduling goals.
“Yet, the Navy continues to expect different performance outcomes in the coming years than it has achieved in the past. There is no basis for expecting industrial base outcomes to improve without changes from the Navy,” the conclusions continued. The Navy has, however, “improved” on achieving its repair goals over the last five years, considering they had “not historically met” them, it found.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) expressed an openness to confirming Phelan, whom he called “nontraditional,” given the findings of the GAO investigation, which he referenced directly.
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“You’re a nontraditional appointee for this position and that can be OK if the tradition is not working, and I think the punchline in this report is that tradition isn’t working,” he said, adding that he has “completely lost confidence” that simply increasing funding will “solve the problem.”
“You’re a nontraditional nominee, but you’re nominated to a position where the tradition doesn’t seem to be working, and so that makes me intrigued with what you might do differently than has been done in the past,” Kaine added.