President Donald Trump announced in his Tuesday night address to Congress
that he will sign an executive order creating an office of shipbuilding to “resurrect the American shipbuilding industry, including commercial shipbuilding and military shipbuilding.”
Trump’s announcement, though it may be surprising, is long overdue.
The total collapse in American shipbuilding over the last several decades has become an economic, military, and national security crisis of particular concern in an era of increased great power competition, particularly with China
.
From Dominance to Decline to Crisis
At the end of World War II, American shipbuilding was in high gear and producing ships on a scale never seen in human history. During the war, the U.S. employed more than a million people in the shipbuilding industry. The fleet America built was an overwhelming two-ocean force that outstripped all the navies of the world
combined by war’s end.
The U.S. had over 1,200 ships in 1946
. Today, the Navy has 287 ships
and that number could continue to decline unless America revitalizes its shipbuilding capacity.
A recent report in The Wall Street Journal
highlighted how the once powerful U.S. shipbuilding industry has steadily declined since the 1980s and ceded its dominance to other countries.
“In the 1970s, U.S. yards were building about 5% of the world’s tonnage, equating to about two dozen new ships a year,” the Journal noted. “But the number of ships coming out of these yards has slowed to a trickle. The U.S. accounted for about 0.1% of the world’s tonnage in 2023. The few U.S.-made commercial ships now come from just two shipyards: one in Philadelphia and another in San Diego.”
We are now far away from the days of President Ronald Reagan’s 600-ship Navy
. In the intervening years the U.S. commercial shipbuilding industry languished
due to reliance on foreign countries, a collapse in the number of U.S.-based firms, and a dwindling labor force with the technical knowledge to do the job.
In practical terms, this decline means that the U.S. now struggles to support a Navy that can meet its basic obligations. Ships are pressed into service past their due date and are increasingly retired without replacements
.
While the U.S. shipbuilding industry went into steep decline, some nations—mostly in Asia—made enormous gains. China has become
by far the world’s most dominant shipbuilder.
While the U.S. Navy remains the largest in overall tonnage, China’s navy now outnumbers the U.S. in overall ships. Even more concerning is the fact that China’s shipbuilding potential is now so far beyond that of the U.S.
Palmer Luckey, the CEO of the innovative new arms company Anduril Industries, explained in an interview just how stark the difference between America’s and China’s shipbuilding capacities has become. He said that China has hundreds of times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States.
Luckey said that some people cast doubt on the numbers because they only include commercial shipbuilding. But, as Luckey noted, China mandates by law that all commercial vessels must meet military standards.
This means that in a large-scale conflict where ships will likely be destroyed and need to be replaced quickly, China can quickly turn on the spigot of production to serve the national interest.
WOW. FINALLY.
Do you know how long those of us who actually get this have been waiting for someone to say it on a major podcast?
And they didn’t miss the most critical part: Merchant Ships!
In assessing the U.S. Navy’s inability to procure ships, defense analyst Gil Barndollar wrote in Foreign Policy
that after years of strategic drift and deindustrialization, the Navy is “ill-equipped to endure a sustained high-intensity conflict in the Pacific.”
Trump even acknowledged in a recent interview that we may have to rely on South Korea for a time because our need for ships is so dire.
“We are going to do something with ships. We need ships and we may have to go a different route than you would normally go,” Trump told talk radio host
Hugh Hewitt in January. “We used to build a ship a day. We don’t build ships anymore. We want to get that started and maybe, we’ll use allies also in terms of building ships. We might have to.”
For now, South Korea
and other partners can provide a necessary Band-Aid.
But relying entirely on foreign help is not a sufficient long-term plan for a U.S. that intends to maintain naval dominance through the 21st century and beyond.
What Trump made clear in his address to Congress is that American naval strength will require a resurgent home-grown industry.
Trump’s plan, according to Wall Street Journal reporters
who reviewed a draft of his executive order, focuses both on jumpstarting the U.S. domestic shipbuilding industry and on decreasing reliance on China.
“The draft executive order includes measures that create Maritime Opportunity Zones and a Maritime Security Trust Fund to boost investments,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “It also says that revenue from fees on Chinese cranes and ships at U.S. ports would fund domestic maritime investments.”
Chinese ships will be hit with hefty fees
when they enter U.S. ports and the money raised will be used to fund the U.S. shipbuilding industry.
Trump’s draft order includes a plan to revamp the acquisition process and includes the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE
, to ensure that money is being allocated efficiently.
This all means that the Trump administration has a clear strategy to address an area of vital national interest. Theorists like Alfred Thayer Mahan and James Corbett have long placed an emphasis on the connection between naval power and national power.
The Trump administration seems to understand that. Hopefully our era of sea blindness
is over. It’s time to rebuild.
Washington state has launched a domestic extremism task force
, and conservatives are sounding the alarm about task force members’ ties to an organization notorious for branding mainstream conservative and Christian organizations as “hate groups.”
State Senate Bill 5950, signed by then-Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, on April 1, 2024, established a “Domestic Extremism and Mass Violence Task Force,” which will recommend changes to state law.
The task force includes many left-wing groups with ties to the Southern Poverty Law Center
, a nonprofit law firm that sued KKK chapters into bankruptcy and now publishes a “hate map” that includes parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty, law firms such as Alliance Defending Freedom, and Christian groups such as the Family Research Council alongside Klan chapters. The SPLC’s accusation against the Family Research Council inspired a domestic terrorism attack in 2012.
“It’s self-evident how this entity is very dangerous to people of faith, to institutions that have a conservative worldview,” Brad Dacus, president and founder of the Pacific Justice Institute, told The Daily Signal
in an interview Tuesday. The SPLC brands Pacific Justice Institute an “anti-LGBTQ+ hate group” because it opposes the LGBTQ agenda.
Task Force Membership
While the SPLC does not appear directly on the task force
, groups with close ties to it do have a presence there, as do other leftist groups.
The task force includes American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab. PERIL’s founding director, Cynthia Miller-Idriss
, serves on the SPLC’s Tracking Hate and Extremism Advisory Committee. Miller-Idriss presented to the task force in January.
Kate Bitz works at the Western States Center, an affiliate of the SPLC. She essentially endorsed the SPLC’s 2020 hate map report
.
Other groups include the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, which demonizes opposition to gender ideology
, and Black Lives Matter Seattle King County, which carried water for
the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, an anarchist uprising amid the 2020 George Floyd riots. Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho also appears on the list.
The task force includes law enforcement organizations, but no explicitly conservative groups.
Dacus, who highlighted his organization’s video condemning the SPLC, also condemned the Black Lives Matter chapter
for “explicit support of anarchy.”
What Harm Does the Task Force Pose?
Dacus warned of attempts to remove nonprofit status under Washington’s tax code from “organizations that are accused of being hate groups
.”
The task force “could also put pressure on banks to close out financial accounts from churches, ministries, and organizations that don’t bend the knee to their radical, intolerant perspectives,” he added. The SPLC has pressured
charities and financial institutions to blacklist “hate groups,” with some success.
Dacus predicted that the task force will aim to “substantively make it painful to have a conservative or traditional worldview.”
Mark Herr, president of the Center for Self-Governance (which SPLC brands an “anti-government extremist group”), echoed Dacus’ warnings.
“The SPLC has labeled mainstream organizations that advocate for civic education, religious liberty, pro-life policies, border security, and election integrity as ‘extremist,’ raising concerns that Washington’s domestic violent extremism task force could adopt similar definitions,” he told The Daily Signal. “If this occurs, conservatives could be unfairly monitored, censored, or even penalized under the guise of combating extremism.”
He further warned of “government surveillance, financial blacklisting, or even legal consequences.”
“The government must ensure that efforts to combat domestic violent extremism focus on actual threats of violence, rather than targeting political opponents,” Herr concluded.
David Boze, the center’s communications director, told The Daily Signal that conflating “speech with actual violence” undermines free speech. “It is an effective way of preempting debate by disparaging an opponent, rather than engaging in the free exchange of ideas.”
“It is possible definitions could be construed in such a way as to smear ideological opponents by categorizing them alongside violent and terrorist groups,” he warned. Yet Boze ultimately expressed confidence in the U.S. Constitution to protect Washingtonians from the worst excesses.
He warned that the effort will divert resources away from the “serious issues of violence and crime.”
Potential Lawsuits
Dacus, the PJI president, urged anyone who suffers harm from the task force to reach out to his organization for a potential lawsuit.
“We at the Pacific Justice institute want to make it very clear: If any organization or ministry is attacked because of their traditional religious beliefs or Judeo-Christian worldview, we want them to contact us immediately so we can help them examine their potential legal recourse,” he told The Daily Signal. He noted that PJI has 36 offices, three in Washington state.
The Daily Signal reached out to the task force, to the SPLC, and to the task force member groups cited above for their responses to criticism. None responded by publication time.
This is the sixth in an eight-article series on “Restoring Trust in Public Health: Lessons from COVID-19.” Four years of the Biden-Harris administration has left Americans rightly skeptical of public health institutions. This series highlights key findings from several congressional oversight reports, including the final report of the U.S. House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, and offers lessons for Congress and the new administration on ways to restore trust in public health.
Federal public health responses
to COVID-19 revealed a myriad of big shortcomings. This was especially the case with regard to face mask protocols and mandates. In a comprehensive review
of federal officials’ responses to COVID-19, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic found that federal masking policies were often arbitrary and without sufficient scientific justification.
In early 2020, when COVID-19
swept the globe, federal officials such as Surgeon General Jerome Adams initially discouraged
mask use among the general public to prevent infection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization initially recommended masks only for the sick or caregivers
. Yet despite no new evidence at the time in favor of masking, officials soon reversed course, and ultimately, President Joe Biden issued an executive order
mandating the use of masks in federal buildings and federal lands. .
The shifting guidance—ranging from discouraging mask usage
to optional “recommendations” to strict mask mandates—was unaccompanied by clear science- based explanations for the radical shifts. The result was widespread confusion and erosion of public trust.
The Mandate
Following Biden’s February 2021 executive order, the CDC imposed
a mandate to require masks on public transportation
. This mandate was to be enforced under Section 264(a) of the Public Health Service Act of 1944. The CDC argued
that the mask mandate was a “reasonable and necessary measure to prevent the introduction, transmission, and spread of COVID-19.”
Responding to the federal mandate, the attorneys general
in 21 states filed a suit to block it. On April 18, 2022, in the case of the Health Freedom Defense Fund Inc. v. Biden, Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle of the U.S. District Court in Florida ruled that the CDC had exceeded its statutory authority as well as violated the Administrative Procedures Act, which required public notice and comment before issuing such a regulation.
Mizelle emphasized that CDC’s actions went far beyond the terms of the Public Health Service Act, which grants authority to prevent the spread of communicable diseases through such actions as “inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination.” The law did not authorize blanket masking mandates.
In rendering her decision, Mizelle wrote
: “If Congress intended this definition, the power bestowed on the CDC would be breathtaking. … And it certainly would not be limited to modest measures of ‘sanitation’ like masks.”
Weak Evidence and Public Confusion
Face masks provide “source control,” meaning that an infected masked person is less likely to infect others. Face masks in closed spaces might also offer some protection. However, the efficacy of masking as a measure to stop widespread viral contagion is an altogether different matter.
In a profoundly revealing February 2020 email
to Sylvia Burwell, former HHS secretary under Barack Obama, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, advised: “Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected, rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drugstore is not really effective in keeping out [the] virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep[ing] out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you. I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a low-risk location.”
On March 8, 2020, Fauci in a “60 Minutes” interview
, declared, “Wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better … but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.”
In 2024, when the select subcommittee interrogated Fauci about any “new” studies between February and April 2020 allegedly supporting mask mandates, he said again that he couldn’t recall
any randomized controlled trials backing the policy. Rather, he broadly reiterated his earlier position: “From a broad public health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins—maybe 10%.”
Yet federal officials, however, relied on comparatively weak studies to justify the mandate. The CDC relied on observational studies—not the rigorous randomized controlled trials—to justify mask mandates. For example, CDC relied upon a Missouri hairstylists study
that focused on two COVID-19-positive hairstylists wearing masks and serving 139 customers with no control group and an Arizona school study
that concluded schools with mask mandates had fewer outbreaks but failed, among other things, to account for the vaccination status of students and teachers.
Federal officials apparently ignored scientific evidence undercutting the government’s position.
For example, in May 2020 the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases published an early review of the professional literature on viral transmission and concluded
, “In a pooled analysis, we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks.”
Likewise, in March 2022, the British Medical Journal published
a Spanish study on the masking of schoolchildren, reporting that cloth face masks “were not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 incidence or transmission, suggesting that this intervention was not effective.”
As noted by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, in December 2022, Dr. Ashish Jha, a former top adviser to Biden, conceded
, “There is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.”
The January 2023 Cochrane Review, a prominent scientific journal, also concluded that wearing masks did not appear to have a significant effect in reducing the spread of respiratory illness. Noting that its major literature review focused on randomized controlled trials, the gold standard in health research, the Cochrane study
found that masking “didnot show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks.”
Moreover, the review also found
no significant difference between surgical masks and N95 respirators in preventing viral infections among health care workers.
Child Masking
Children were infinitely less vulnerable to COVID-19 than older adults, and yet government officials insisted on child masking policies while ignoring developmental risks. Scientific evidence indicates that extended childhood masking may have caused speech, language, and social developmental delays. Moreover, such policies also deviated sharply from international public health guidelines warning against the masking of young children during the pandemic.
Yet again, the Biden administration disregarded real-time research and evidence to advance its mandate agenda on the lives of Americans.
In its final 2024 report, the select subcommittee thus concluded
: “These actions undermined the American people’s belief in the CDC, public health leadership, and science as a whole.”
As The New York Times reported
, by March 2022, the number of Americans who trusted the CDC fell to just 44%, compared to 69% registering trust at the onset of the pandemic.
Going forward, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new HHS secretary, and his colleagues at the CDC must communicate clearly and consistently and make sure that any change in public health guidance is publicly acknowledged and firmly rooted in strong scientific evidence. Restoring faith in public health is crucial to ensuring a more effective response to the next national medical emergency.
Ana Sofia Santiago-Russe, a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation, contributed research for this article.
Americans witnessed an unprecedented display of incivility during President Donald Trump
’s address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night when Rep. Al Green
, D-Texas, had to be physically removed from the House chamber after disrupting the president’s speech.
Now, the Houston-area congressman has been censured by his colleagues, on a vote of 224 to 198.
Ten Democrats
joined with House Republicans on Thursday to censure Green
for his violation of House rules, and the House Freedom Caucus announced a bill
to strip Green of his committee assignments. The House censure is a formal condemnation by the legislative body, but it does not revoke privileges from Green.
House Speaker Mike Johnson
, R-La., told The Daily Signal and other conservative social media influencers that Green was “belligerent” and “so disrespectful.” No Republicans had to be removed by the sergeant-at-arms during then-President Joe Biden’s address in 2021 or his subsequent State of the Union addresses.
Green, 77, repeatedly shook his cane at Trump before being removed from the House chamber.
“He needed to be censured,” Rep. Andy Harris
, R-Md., chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told The Daily Signal.
“A group of us think it needs to go further than that. I believe we’re going to file, the Freedom Caucus, will file a bill, I think today or tomorrow that will actually strip him of committees,”Harris explained.
Green’s actions generated significant media coverage, and some members of Congress said they were a distraction from the real work of fixing the country’s problems.
“So, he got, unfortunately, his time in front of the cameras on Tuesday, and he then grabs some more time in front of the cameras today. But I think we really need to have, we need to have real penalties for this kind of abuse, and that’s why I think he needs to be stripped of all of his committees,” Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., told The Daily Signal.
“The other thing is that I just want to get this done and move on to save the country,” Burlison said.
“You know, the voters send their person. I might not agree with them. Doesn’t matter whether I like them or not. That’s not the point. I think the bigger point is look, Rep. Green had an opportunity to voice his opposition, and that’s fine, but there’s a time and a place and a way to do that,” Rep. Scott Perry
, R-Pa., told The Daily Signal.
“Quite honestly, I think there are much more important things that we should be doing, but we’re not going to be able to do those important things if we’re going to, you know, have these petty antics that really are meant to just sensationalize. I guess one individual wants to go out and raise money or something,” Perry said.
“I don’t think it [the House censure] went nearly far enough, because, as you probably heard on the House floor just a few minutes ago, that he said he would do it again. So, I think there needs to be some stronger consequences for his actions, because not only were they deliberate, but he defied the speaker when the speaker told him multiple times to sit down,” Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., told The Daily Signal
“This has to do with the House and the decorum of the House and the rules of the House, where we govern and do so respectfully. We may disagree, absolutely, as is absolutely common and expected, but that’s not the way that the House is to operate.” Clyde explained.
Green has represented the 9th Congressional District of Texas, which encompasses the southwestern portion of the greater Houston area, since 2005. The district is deep blue, and Green did not have a Republican challenger during the 2024 general election
.
In the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires
, two friends are stepping up to provide clothing and essentials to victims who have lost everything.
Courtney Mizel and Erin Feniger Maggio run Rebuild and Renew
, a Santa Monica-based pop-up boutique and nonprofit where individuals and families affected by the recent fires
can rebuild their wardrobe with new or vintage clothing at no cost.
Mizel, who opened the boutique in her living room, told The Daily Signal that she and Feniger Maggio were inspired to start their initiative when they saw videos of fire victims digging through piles of clothing at evacuation centers.
“These are people who have lost everything,” Mizel said. “And to give them a way to actually feel a little bit sense of normal, and to be able to go into a store and a boutique setting and actually shop … they could start rebuilding their wardrobes and rebuilding their lives.”
The Palisades Fire, which began in Los Angeles County on Jan. 7, burned 23,707 acres, killed 12 people and destroyed 6,837 structures before it was contained on Jan. 31.
“I think what people don’t realize is these are entire communities
which are affected. It’s not just individuals,” Mizel stated.
One of the biggest challenges facing the Rebuild and Renew staff two months after the fires began is ensuring there are enough volunteers to operate the boutique, which is now run out of a mall.
“In the very beginning, there were tons of people wanting to volunteer, and I think people kind of started going on with their lives,” Mizel said, adding that many victims are still in need of help
.
Mizel’s message to those affected by the fires is, “We’re here to support you. We know that you are rebuilding your lives, and we can only help in the area of clothing, but we want to help people rebuild one garment at a time.”
Rebuild and Renew is a budding locale for community and volunteer work, according to the boutique’s retail experience and merchandising manager Alyssa Ramirez.
“We get a lot of recurring customers too, which has been nice because it’s really just reinforced that community that we wanted to build,” Ramirez, a current graduate student, told The Daily Signal.
“It’s different from all the other donation centers,” Ramirez explained. “It’s like a store. We do it by appointment-only to not only ensure the privacy
, but to allow for that retail experience.”
