Marines furious over the Navy’s plan for troop-carrying ships

By the time the Pentagon rolls out its annual budget request each spring, leaders usually have hashed out the details and present themselves — at least in public — as a united front.

Not this year.

The Defense Department this month rejected a key element of the Navy’s newest shipbuilding plan, touching off a behind-the-scenes scrum that spilled out into public view this week over the future of troop-carrying ships that are the centerpiece of the Marine Corps’ seaborne mission.

The disagreement raises questions over what direction Pentagon leadership wants to go in building new amphibious ships to ferry Marines and their equipment around the globe as the Corps pivots to countering China after two decades in the Middle East.

It’s the latest flareup in a yearslong debate over what kind of ships to build for the Marines, as policymakers try to chart a course for the future in which Beijing has quickly emerged as a military and economic rival.

The Navy on Monday announced that this year’s budget blueprint won’t include money to fund the 17th San Antonio-class amphibious ship, a $1.6 billion vessel that carries Marines and launches helicopters and watercraft.

The reason comes down to money, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday said Wednesday.

“The driving issue here that drove that decision had to do with cost,” Gilday said at the McAleese Defense Programs conference, explaining that it was the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s decision to carry out a “strategic pause” in buying and constructing amphibs.

He noted the unit cost of the first three ships belonging to the ship class’s latest version — called Flight II — has gone up with each hull. “We’re moving in the wrong direction,” he said.

The same day Gilday spoke, Marine Commandant Gen. David Berger rejected the cost argument. “You could say it’s more expensive today. Well yeah, so is a gallon of milk, right, than last year. I got that. But in base dollars, I think industry is driving that price down.”

The decision to pause the ship funding is part of a wider relook at the Navy’s amphibious ship programs ordered by the Pentagon, to consider whether they align with broader policy goals. The Navy had only just submitted an amphibious plan to Congress in December, but the Pentagon ordered a redo and the Navy, to the frustration of the Marine Corps, did little to push back.

“We just did a study and came up with a number [of ships], we would like to know what has changed over the past few weeks” that requires a new look, said one Marine officer, who like others quoted for this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly about an internal issue.

The Navy referred questions on the need for the new study to the Pentagon, and Pentagon officials did not respond to a request for comment.

SETTING A COURSE

The issue of the amphibious fleet in particular has become a cornerstone issue for the Navy as it struggles to modernize to meet China's increasingly effective anti-ship capabilities, putting large ships such as amphibs and aircraft carriers at greater risk.

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, speaking at the McAleese conference, didn’t say the service is walking away from the amphibious ship program, but instead is taking the pause before putting money toward the ship and any next-generation amphibious ships, which the Marines say they desperately need.

Berger argued that the Navy is squandering a moment where the shipbuilding industry is primed to keep building the vessels. But now “we’re going to take a timeout. From my perspective, I can’t accept that when the inventory, the capacity has to be no less than 31” ships.

The number is a reference to the “bare minimum” of what the Corps says it needs to meet Pentagon tasking.

The actual number of hulls will drop to 24 this decade if Congress allows the Navy to follow through on plans it presented on Monday to begin retiring some of the oldest ships without buying replacements.

The problem has real-world consequences. The Marines have said that twice over the past year the service has been unable to deploy in emergency situations due to lack of ships. The first time came when Russia invaded Ukraine and a Marine unit couldn’t head to the region, and the second was in February when a unit couldn’t provide humanitarian assistance after the devastating earthquake in Turkey.

The halting of the ship’s production this week along with the Pentagon’s squelching of the Navy’s plans recall a similar event in 2020, when then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper publicly rejected the Navy’s annual 30-year shipbuilding plan, and personally oversaw the writing of a new document that was released months later, in the lame duck days of the Trump presidency.

This split between the Navy and Marine Corps “is partly [the Pentagon’s] fault,” according to Bryan Clark, a retired Navy officer now at the Hudson Institute.

The competing visions for the size and composition of the fleet revolve around how it will prepare to confront or deter China in the coming years.

“The problem is the large amphib requirement is based largely on peacetime presence needs, rather than warfighting scenarios,” where amphibious operations would not likely be heavily employed, Clark said. The Pentagon “has prioritized meeting needs for defending an invasion of Taiwan and other warfighting scenarios over presence needs, so the large amphibious ship requirement goes unfilled.”

While strategies remain in flux, neither the Pentagon nor the Navy has been able to offer a detailed explanation as to why the December study needed immediate rethinking.

“If you want to kill a program, you commission study after study and you study it to death,” a Senate aide said.

Leaders across the Pentagon are “really at loggerheads” on the amphibious ship issue, and “coupled with the strategic pause comments, it really gets you to a place where you can understand that the anti-amphibious coalition is in the driver's seat on this one,” the aide continued.

PLANS HELD UP

The amphibious plan, which is being worked on by the Navy, Marines and the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office is just one of three shipbuilding plans the Navy owes the Pentagon and Congress this year.

The annual 30-year shipbuilding plan, which is required to be submitted along with the budget, is late for the second year in a row. Navy officials say it will be released in the coming weeks, however.

The Navy came under fire last year from Capitol Hill for releasing a 30-year plan document that offered three options rather than a single plan. Under that guidance, the first option would build a 316-ship fleet by 2052, the second sketched a 327-ship Navy and the third, which the service said in the document that the industrial base is currently unable to support, would yield a 367-ship fleet. The first two options fell short of the congressionally mandated 355-ship Navy, which the service maintained as its goal since 2016 but had made no progress toward reaching.

Del Toro confirmed this week he’ll present a document with the three options again, and the new plan will also include a menu of possibilities for Congress and Pentagon leadership to consider.

The top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Roger Wicker, said in a statement this week that “no matter the favored phrase of the day – ‘divest to invest,’ ‘strategic pause,’ ‘capability over capacity,’ – the president’s defense budget is, in practice, sinking our future fleet.” Wicker’s state of Mississippi is home to the Huntington Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, which builds the San Antonio-class ships.

While the new $255 billion Navy budget was the highest ever, “we’re not going to be swimming in money forever,” said Gilday, the Navy admiral. “We’ve got to start making some hard decisions.”

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The Sharp-Witted Representative Who Opened the Doors of Congress to Young Moms

Pat Schroeder was never supposed to win her congressional seat. As she recounted in her 1998 book 24 Years of House Work … and the Place Is Still a Mess — a title that hints at the irreverent public figure she cut in Washington — she was recruited as a “kamikaze” anti-war candidate for Colorado’s 1^st Congressional District in 1972. In the primary, she faced a well-funded state senator; in the general election, an overconfident Republican district attorney.

More to the point, she was just 31, with a 6-year-old and a 2-year-old.

“The consensus, even from some of my most liberal friends, was that I was trying to do too much too fast,” Schroeder, who died this week at 82, wrote in her book. The National Women’s Political Caucus, which she had helped to found previously, encouraged her to run for city council or school board instead. After she won, with 52 percent of the vote, New York Democratic Rep. Bella Abzug called Schroeder on the phone and offered a warning: “I hear you have little kids. You won’t be able to do this job.”

“So it wasn’t even just being a woman,” Schroeder recalled in a 2015 interview with the House’s Office of the Historian. “It was being a young woman with little kids, and that really threw people for a loop.” Entering Congress, at her stage of life, seemed not just subversive, but absurd.

Schroeder would wind up serving 12 terms in Congress, cementing herself not just as a trailblazer — she and Abzug were among only 14 women in the House when she was elected — but a symbol of what can happen when people, and particularly women, in the thick of life experience get a seat at the table of power. Among her highest-profile legislative victories were the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which protected women from being fired for being pregnant (following a 1976 Supreme Court ruling that denied that protection under gender discrimination law), and the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993, which entitles most employees to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for family members or themselves. (The original bill Schroeder filed asked for 26 weeks, with pay.)

What hard-fought success Schroeder got — “It took nine months to deliver each of my children and nine years to deliver FMLA,” she’d later say — came from “her humanity and her persistence and her humor,” says Ellen Bravo, the former director of 9to5, National Association of Working Women, one of many national groups that worked for the bill’s passage. Year after year, Schroeder leaned into the absurdity of Washington, deploying a brand of witty straight talk that drew attention to her causes, well before social media and viral memes.

“She was able to not just withstand obnoxious attacks on her, but to direct withering responses at the people” who went after her, Bravo says. “She handled them in a way that ate right through the veneer of authority.”

Schroeder was the one who declared that Ronald Reagan had a “Teflon-coated presidency” (an idea that reportedly came to her while frying eggs on a nonstick pan) and dubbed George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle members of the “lucky sperm club” because they were able to run for office with the benefit of family wealth.

And she faced her own indignities with humor and theatrics. When she won a seat on the House Armed Services Committee early in her tenure, the chair, a Louisiana Democrat named F. Edward Hébert, was angry that she and Ron Dellums, a Black Democrat from California, had been placed on the committee against Hébert’s wishes. He provided only a single chair for the two of them, so Schroeder and Dellums squeezed into it together — “cheek-to-cheek,” she would later write — and sat that way for two years. “Barney Frank used to always say it’s the only half-assed thing I did when I was in Congress, but I’m not sure that’s true,” she quipped to the House historian years later.

Even as Schroeder grew in influence, eventually launching a short-lived bid for president in 1987, she faced doubts and digs about her demeanor: the time she wore a bunny suit to entertain kids in the U.S. Embassy during a 1987 Armed Services trip to China, the fact that she would sometimes sign her name with a smiley-face in the “P.” Some of the biggest scrutiny came when she dropped out of the presidential race and openly cried at the press conference, launching 1,000 think pieces about gender, politics and public norms.

But Schroeder had never feared wearing her motherhood or womanhood on her sleeve, down to bringing her children — and sometimes a pet bunny named Franklin Delano Rabbit — back and forth with her to Denver and on official international trips. “They’d usually spill at least two Cokes and a glass of milk on me before I got off [the ground],” she told the House historian years later. “I was always sticky … People would just be horrified, but that’s how we were.”

That unapologetic approach to parenthood is less rare today, in many public spheres. But there are still plenty of barriers to women with young children running for office, says Liuba Grechen Shirley, who ran for a New York congressional seat in 2018 with two toddlers at home and went on to form the group Vote Mama, which supports young mothers in politics.

And on the congressional level, at least, the family-friendly policies Schroeder championed at the height of her influence have largely been frozen in time. While the FMLA was game-changing 30 years ago, most of its advocates consider it woefully incomplete. As Grechen Shirley and Bravo point out, the law covers only 60 percent of workers, due to restrictions on eligibility. Many eligible people aren’t able to take advantage of it because they can’t afford to take the time off. (Bravo notes that state laws mandating paid sick leave are gaining momentum — they’ve been passed now in 11 states and the District of Columbia.)

Grechen Shirley attributes the lack of progress to a lack of representation. The 118th Congress has a record number of women and yet that's still only 153 of 540 voting and nonvoting members, or 28 percent of the body. But it’s not just that there aren’t enough women in Congress, Grechen Shirley contends, echoing what Schroeder discovered 50 years ago. It’s that there aren’t enough mothers.

“It’s because our policies were not made by people who have the lived experience. If we want to change the system, we have to change the system-makers,” she says. “So many women will wait until their children are grown before they consider running, so it’s difficult to build that political power to get tenure, to get those leadership positions.”

During her own race, Grechen Shirley successfully petitioned the Federal Election Commission to allow the use of campaign funds for child care. And in her own campaign and afterward, she would often repeat a political line, something she’d heard that a congresswoman once said — “I have a brain and a uterus, and I use both.”

“Dammit, I love that quote,” Grechen Shirley says, though for years, she didn’t know the source.

Of course, it was Pat Schroeder.

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House GOP panel launches probe into Air Force’s ‘unauthorized’ record disclosures

The House Judiciary Committee is launching an investigation into the various unauthorized record disclosures the Air Force acknowledged it made last year, including known cases of the military branch releasing personnel records of GOP candidates to a Democratic-aligned group.

A GOP-led Judiciary subpanel investigating the politicization of the federal government announced Thursday it had launched a probe after the Air Force acknowledged that an internal investigation had concluded 11 individuals were affected by improper disclosures.

In a letter to Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) and Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) sought additional information on the matter, including all records and communications related to the improper disclosures.

“In late February 2023, media reports highlighted how the OSAF improperly disclosed Official Military Personnel Files (OMPF) of 11 servicemembers without appropriate authorization or lawful consent. The [Office of the Secretary of the Air Force] reportedly released the personnel files of at least two Members of Congress to an opposition research firm that received money from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC),” they wrote.

“While the Air Force has rightfully taken responsibility for these inappropriate OMPF disclosures, questions remain unanswered about the U.S. Air Force’s collection, maintenance, and dissemination of this sensitive information,” their letter to Kendall continued.

Other panels, including the House Armed Services and Oversight committees, have sought details from the Pentagon on the disclosures.

POLITICO first reported that the Air Force had notified at least two sitting House Republicans — Reps. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) and Zach Nunn (R-Iowa) — that it had improperly released their personnel military records to a third party.

In the case of Bacon, a letter last month from the Air Force identified Abraham Payton of the Due Diligence Group, a research firm with Democratic ties, as “inappropriately” requesting and successfully obtaining these records.

Payton, according to the letter, said he was seeking the records for employment and benefit purposes, but the Air Force acknowledged such records were released without their authorization, which is protected under the Privacy Act of 1974. The letter noted that Payton was already in possession of the Nebraska Republican’s social security number when filling out the information request form.

Other GOP candidates from last cycle have shared that they were similarly notified by the Air Force that Payton, a former research director for the Democratic group American Bridge, was behind such requests for their records. They include Sam Peters, a Republican who challenged Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) in November, and Kevin Dellicker, who fell short in the GOP primary race to take on Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.).

Such efforts by Due Diligence Group included more than one military branch, with Payton attempting to get records on Colin Schmitt, who is currently serving in the New York National Guard and who challenged Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) in the general election last cycle for the state’s 18th district, according to a copy of the request form.

The Air Force said last month that an internal investigation it launched after POLITICO reported on former GOP candidate Jennifer-Ruth Green’s military records in October — when she was challenging Rep. Frank Mrvan (D-Ind.) in a battleground district — found that the private records of 11 individuals were improperly disclosed to a third party.

Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek has said that “virtually all” of the 11 unapproved releases were made to the same third party “who represented himself as a background investigator seeking service records for employment purposes.”

It is unclear if Payton was behind all of the 11 Air Force requests. Nunn has not publicly disclosed if Payton was the individual who sought his military personnel records, and Green has confirmed only that Due Diligence sought hers.

The other individuals affected by the Air Force records releases are not publicly known. But the House Armed Services and Oversight committees are also inquiring about the matter, with Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) vowing last week to keep chasing down details of the disclosures.

POLITICO was told by the person who gave it Green’s military records last year that they were obtained through a public records request. POLITICO reviewed the request for the records made by a third party, which sought a “publicly releasable/redacted copy of OMPF [Official Military Personnel File] per Freedom of Information Act statutes.” The requester identified the purpose of the request as relating to “benefits,” “employment” and “other.”

POLITICO also reviewed the letter sent in response to the requester. A military employee responded with a password-protected version of the file with limited redactions. After publication, the Air Force said it erred in releasing the records and launched an investigation.

Bacon said last month that Air Force Secretary Kendall informed him that material from the Air Force’s internal investigation into the records releases was turned over to the Justice Department for possible further action. And Schmitt is joining all five GOP Air Force veterans in calling for a DOJ inquiry into whether political research crossed into criminal activity.

The Justice Department has declined to comment on questions related to the existence or the status of a possible investigation into the unauthorized disclosures, but in a statement on Sunday, a DOJ spokesperson said they are “aware of the concerns raised” and that the department has been “communicating with the U.S. Air Force about this matter.”

Stewart and Jordan also asked for the Air Force to turn over requests made by DDG from the start of January 2021 to the present, all the notifications to affected servicemembers that their information was improperly impacted, documents related to its policies on record disclosure policies, and files on any internal investigations into the matter.

“My proudest years were spent defending our great nation in the Air Force. It’s a shame to see this sacred branch of our government weaponized, but we will right this wrong,” tweeted Stewart, a member of the Republican-led subcommittee, arguing that they will “demand accountability.”

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DeSantis’ anti-woke law remains blocked in Florida colleges

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida remains unable to enforce the “Stop-WOKE” law touted by Gov. Ron DeSantis in light of a federal appeals court ruling Thursday that keeps the policies on hold for colleges and universities.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a request from the DeSantis administration and higher education officials to block an injunction that determined the law restricting how race can be taught in schools was unconstitutional, ensuring that state officials are barred from carrying out the measure for now. While the groups that challenged the state are claiming victory over the ruling, DeSantis officials say the state will ultimately prevail once the case is heard.

“Professors must be able to discuss subjects like race and gender without hesitation or fear of state reprisal,” said the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, one group that sued over the legislation. “Any law that limits the free exchange of ideas in university classrooms should lose in both the court of law and the court of public opinion.”

Breaking it down: In a two-paragraph order, a three-judge panel of the appeals court denied the state’s request for a stay of the injunction from U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, who determined the anti-woke law is “positively dystopian.”

Florida’s Republican-led Legislature approved the legislation, FL HB 7 (22R), or the Individual Freedom Act, in 2022 to expand anti-discrimination laws to prohibit schools and companies from leveling guilt or blame to students and employees based on race or sex. Inspired by DeSantis, it takes aim at lessons over issues like “white privilege” by creating new protections for students and workers, including that a person should not be instructed to “feel guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” due to their race, color, sex or national origin.

The law was challenged in several lawsuits, including one by FIRE and another by the ACLU, ACLU of Florida and Legal Defense Fund, both of which sued the state on behalf of students and educators. Despite the legal challenges, the DeSantis administration expects the policies to be found lawful.

“The Court did not rule on the merits of our appeal,” Bryan Griffin, press secretary for DeSantis, said in a statement. “The appeal is ongoing, and we remain confident that the law is constitutional.”

What’s next: There is no hearing currently scheduled in the case.

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