Adding to the pain of a staggering $40 trillion national debt, which undoubtedly includes wasteful government spending and failed projects, a new federal audit reveals the U.S. Navy has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars to sustain idle submarines and crews that “provide no operational capability.” The scandal involves the country’s fleet of submarines, critical to national defense because they carry out Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions, project power ashore with Tomahawk cruise missiles and support battle group operations. As of fiscal year 2025, the Navy has 44 attack submarines, according to the probe, recently published by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, and the vessels are some of the most requested assets by global combatant commanders.
However, in the last 10 years the Navy has lost over 15,000 operational days and an estimated $3.4 billion because maintenance delays have kept active attack submarines idle. “Lost operational days include delays completing depot maintenance and active idle time,” the GAO report states. “Active idle time describes a period when an attack submarine and its crew must remain pier-side because they are no longer certified to conduct normal operations and cannot be inducted into a maintenance period.” The probe also found that the Navy faces “significant challenges” managing inactive idle time for attack submarines. This is when a sub designated for decommissioning cannot be inducted into a dry dock in a shipyard. “As a result, the submarine and its crew must remain pier-side until a shipyard has the capacity in a dry dock to defuel their nuclear reactor,” according to the GAO.
The Navy’s 44 active attack submarines need access to shipyards for maintenance and repairs, but the constant backlog of older vessels that have been designated for decommissioning block access to the dry docks creating a serious holding pattern known as idle time. Although this technically differs from active idle time when operational subs wait for maintenance, both are tremendously inefficient, drain taxpayer resources and slash the number of submarines available for deployment. In the period examined, fiscal year 2016 through 2025, the maintenance delays wasted huge amounts of public funds to sustain both crews and submarines that provided no operational capability and contributed nothing to national defense. “Inactive idle time for submarines has grown and is projected to worsen,” the GAO confirms, adding that “without mitigation, 15 attack submarines will enter inactive idle time from fiscal year 2026 through fiscal year 2030.” During that time the Navy could incur over 14,000 days of inactive idle time and $3.1 billion in costs to operate and support the inactive submarines, the probe found.
The attack submarines get serviced at four aging public facilities— Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, and Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard—described by the Navy as “obsolete” and inefficient. The work is very involved and time-consuming and includes overhauls, alterations, refits, restorations and nuclear refueling. GAO investigators determined that the costly maintenance backlog has persisted since at least fiscal year 2008 with no improvement in site. “Further, the U.S. Navy only completed about 11 percent of attack submarine depot maintenance on time at the public shipyards, from fiscal years 2016 through 2025,” the report states. It appears that the Navy is not that concerned about the problem and hasn’t even bothered to fully evaluate alternative options to more efficiently decommission attack submarines and develop and implement an inactivation plan that could allow it to reduce inactive idle time for crews to save billions.
Congressional investigators reveal that they made two common-sense recommendations, that the Navy decommission attack subs more efficiently and develop a plan to reduce inactive idle time. Seemingly dismissive of the GAO’s findings, the Navy “verbally concurred” with the watchdog’s recommendations but did not bother to provide written comments as is customary after getting slammed in a federal audit. It also failed to disclose when it will make changes to its inefficient, decades-long system that continues fleecing American taxpayers out of huge sums amid record-breaking national debt.
