Cost of Trump’s Namesake Warships Likely to Rise by 50 Percent or More

A new cl*** of warships that President Trump says will anchor a “golden fleet” for the Navy is expected to cost at least 50 percent more than estimated earlier, according to a government report released on Wednesday.

The first planned Trump-cl*** battleship, the U.S.S. Defiant, is likely to cost $23.4 billion, $8 billion more than the Navy initially indicated.

The cost of each of the 14 additional vessels is expected to jump to slightly more than $18 billion from $10.2 billion, for a total cost of $275 billion for 15 ships.

The estimates were calculated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which said that the first of the battleships might take eight years or longer to build.

Mr. Trump announced in December that he expected two of the ships to be constructed over the next two and a half years.

“They’ll help maintain American military supremacy, revive the American shipbuilding industry and inspire fear in America’s enemies all over the world,” Mr. Trump said at the time, alongside renderings of the new ships.

Months after the announcement, Mr. Trump decided that the ships would be powered by nuclear reactors instead of the gas turbine engines used in destroyers and cruisers, a move that adds significantly to the costs.

“New ship types and new ship cl***es invariably cost more than is estimated at the start of construction,” said Norman Polmar, a naval ***yst and author.

The term battleship usually refers to an earlier era of much larger armored warships that had multiple turrets armed with major-caliber guns. The last U.S. battleship was launched in 1944.

The ships Mr. Trump envisions are significantly smaller and would have guided missiles as their primary armament instead.

Some of the additional weapons the Navy has said will arm the new ships, like an electromagnetic gun, were canceled after the spending of billions on decades of failed research and development. Others, like a defensive laser weapon, do not yet exist.

Mr. Trump has said he may want to build as many as 25 nuclear-powered battleships, which he called the “golden fleet.”

Building 25 of the larger warships would cost roughly $455 billion, according to the figures provided by the report.

Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon and the ranking member of the Budget Committee, requested that the Congressional Budget Office study the new battleship program.

“At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, gas, health care and child care, Congress cannot throw hundreds of billions of dollars at Trump’s ‘Golden Fleet,’ including plastering his name across a new battleship,” the senator said in a statement.

In April, Mr. Trump fired his Navy secretary for not moving quickly enough on building the battleship of his dreams.

On Tuesday, Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, said in a statement that funds for the new fleet were removed from the continuing resolution that is advancing through the Senate and would fund the government through Dec. 11.

Whether any of the ships will ever actually be built is not certain, as the Navy in recent years has tried and failed to build new types of warships on time and on budget. One such program, the Constellation-cl*** frigate, was canceled just a month before Mr. Trump announced his namesake vessel. Another, called the littoral combat ship, has been plagued by problems and the Navy has already begun decommissioning some of them.

The Ford-cl*** aircraft carriers have been bedeviled by mechanical and electrical problems since the lead ship of the cl*** was commissioned. Only one is currently in service, and the delivery of the next two has been delayed by years.

The president’s fixation on new ships also extends to the Coast Guard, with his recent decision to order $7 billion in no-bid contracts to build 11 new icebreakers for use in the Arctic and Antarctic.

In a speech to military leaders last September, Mr. Trump cited the 1950s do***entary television series “Victory at Sea,” which touted the role that battleships and other Navy vessels played in World War II.

“I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships,” the president said. “I used to watch ‘Victory at Sea.’ I love ‘Victory at Sea.’”

But battleships played a diminished role during battles in the Pacific during World War II as newer aircraft carriers proved more versatile and effective in fighting the Japanese at sea.

Since then, the Navy has sought to build smaller but far more capable warships that can carry out different kinds of missions.

Mr. Trump is not the first president to want to bring battleships back into service, after they were decommissioned following World War II and placed back into commission intermittently for service in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. President Ronald Reagan made them a centerpiece of his “600-ship Navy” concept when he personally recommissioned the battleship U.S.S. New Jersey in 1982.

The last of those battleships, the U.S.S. Missouri, was decommissioned in 1992 after seeing combat during the Persian Gulf War and was turned into a floating museum in Pearl Harbor.