New White House Executive Order Sets Stage for U.S. Shipbuilding Action Plan
Mallory Shelbourne
April 10, 2025 7:07 PM
A new executive order is calling on U.S. senior leadership to create a maritime action plan by November, according to a document signed by President Trump on Wednesday.
The maritime executive order is pushing for a government-wide overhaul to the commercial maritime sector to revitalize U.S. shipbuilding as the Trump administration aims to blunt China’s dominance of commercial shipbuilding.
The order assigns a wide-range of tasks to numerous members of Trump’s cabinet – including the heads of the departments of Defense, Commerce, State, Transportation, Homeland Security and Labor, and the U.S. Trade Representative – that will feed into the maritime action plan anchored by the White House’s national security advisor and the chief of the Office of Management and Budget.
Those tasks include a government-wide shipbuilding assessment by the heads of the Defense Department, State Department, Department of Transportation and Department of Homeland Security that will evaluate how the U.S. buys ships. A report that looks at how to grow the number of competitive U.S. shipyards and minimize both program delays and cost overages across the “surface, subsurface, and unmanned” platforms is due to President Donald Trump within 45 days of the EO’s signing, according to the language.
https://news.usni.org/2025/04/10/new-white-house-executive-order-sets-stage-for-u-s-shipbuilding-action-plan
