Senator Tim Sheehy warned that the crisis in American shipbuilding has left the United States dangerously outgunned by China’s aggressively expanding fleet.
Speaking on “The Fox News Rundown,” the former Marine said China is now building ships much faster than the United States, creating a national security issue.
“Our Navy right now is not where it needs to be,” Sheehy told Fox News Channel’s Aisha Husni.
He later added: “Right now, when you compare our fleet to China, they are building ships 230 times faster than us. Their shipyards can make repairs 90% faster than we can.”
Sheehy blamed the slowdown on the country’s complacency during a long period of peace, arguing that the United States was not prepared for future conflicts.
He warned that while the exhausted army could be repaired in just a year or two, rebuilding the Navy’s industrial base represented a much deeper and longer-term problem.
“We had allowed our shipbuilding industry to atrophy over the last 30 years to a very frightening degree because we felt the peace dividends were permanent, the Pax Americana was here to stay, and we felt we didn’t need these big, expensive ships anymore,” he said.
Al-Sheehi said that rebuilding the army could take between one and two years and the air force up to five years.
But he said it was much more difficult to regain the skills needed to build ships, adding that America had not built ships “in a meaningful way for a long time.”
The Trump administration has been an outspoken critic of the slowdown in shipbuilding in the United States.
In April 2025, the White House issued an executive order attempting to address the problem, writing a policy to revitalize and rebuild the maritime industry.
The order created the Maritime Action Plan (MAP) to revive the industry, helped facilitate shipbuilding for private industry, and instructed Cabinet members to work on strategies to boost production.
During a joint address to Congress, Trump pledged to revive the shipbuilding industry, saying: “We used to make a lot of ships. We don’t make them as much anymore, but we’re going to make them very quickly, very soon. And it’s going to have a tremendous impact.”
Part of the problem was the destruction of shipbuilding sites, Sheehy said.
He blamed apartment construction and a boom in waterfront property values, adding that industries seen as “dirty” or “noisy” are often shipped overseas.
“Let’s take heavy industry and push it to other countries because it’s dirty, noisy, not profitable, and let’s make our system based on financial improvement,” Sheehy said.
He later added: “As a result, we have lost invaluable and irreplaceable assets in terms of the ability to not only build the Navy but also sustain it. Therefore, we are now at a moment where both parties realize that we have not adequately invested in our fleet.”