President Trump has ordered the Navy to develop a plan to replace the electromagnetic catapults used to launch aircraft from future Ford-class aircraft carriers with legacy steam catapults. That might make sense if the newer technology had failed. It has not.
The USS Gerald R. Ford was the first U.S. carrier built to launch aircraft electromagnetically rather than with steam power. The Navy spent decades developing the technology, including years of testing a full-scale system ashore, before installing it on the Ford and making it standard for the carriers that would follow. The Navy made that change for a reason: electromagnetic launch was designed to handle everything from lightweight unmanned aircraft to heavy strike fighters, while requiring less maintenance and manpower than steam catapults.
Getting there was notoriously difficult. The electromagnetic system was expensive and suffered years of reliability problems. But the Navy worked through them. Today, the system has successfully launched tens of thousands of aircraft from the Ford, the first operational U.S. carrier equipped with it, and Navy testing indicates the ship can launch aircraft at a higher rate than the older carriers it replaced. The Navy endured years of cost and delay to make the technological transition — and succeeded.
Returning to steam catapults on the fourth Ford-class carrier will recover none of the time or money already spent. General Atomics, the company that builds the system, says nearly half of the electromagnetic launch equipment for that carrier has already been produced. Reversing course means walking away from some of that work, redesigning a ship already built around electromagnetic launch, rebuilding a steam-catapult supply chain the Ford class was meant to replace and piling new costs and delays onto a carrier already years behind schedule.
Americans paid once to move forward. Now we will pay again to move backward.
The Navy is not the only place where the federal government is spending money to reverse course. This year alone, the Trump administration has committed nearly $4 billion to persuade energy companies to abandon offshore-wind projects they had already paid to pursue. In the latest deal, the government will return $1.22 billion to the energy company RWE if it surrenders three offshore-wind leases and walks away from projects it had planned to develop.
The particulars are different from an aircraft carrier, but the financial logic is remarkably similar. Taxpayers are putting up billions of dollars to make prospective American wind energy production disappear. The government helped establish a path toward a newer technology. Public and private money followed. Now the government is spending additional money to reverse course.
Trump has described his preference for steam systems the Navy has already replaced as “common sense,” based in part on a conversation years ago with a sailor who told him steam was better. He speaks about wind power with the same certainty, declaring that it “doesn’t work.” The president’s personal intuition is a poor substitute for engineering evidence and economic analysis when he is spending billions of our dollars to turn those intuitions into policy.
Conservative stewardship of taxpayer funding means preserving successful investments, not spending billions more to undo them. That should be especially obvious for an administration that has made eliminating government waste one of its stated priorities.
The Navy’s experience also illustrates why the government sometimes accepts the cost and risk of advancing technology. Steam catapults worked, but they were a mature technology with limits the Navy believed electromagnetic launch could overcome. Moving from that proven system to a newer one required enormous upfront investment before the promised advantages could be realized. The transition was difficult, expensive and at times badly managed. But it ultimately succeeded.
That is one reason the government invests in emerging technology in the first place. New technologies often have to get over a bow wave of research, infrastructure and startup costs before their advantages can be realized at scale. Public investment can help bridge that gap.
A new administration is entitled to decide that such support has gone too far. Subsidies can expire. Future tax incentives can change. Projects that fail can and should be abandoned. But once taxpayers have helped a technology clear that expensive hurdle and that technology has proved successful, reversing course means spending again to undo the transition they already financed. In the case of the Ford class, the administration has identified no operational improvement that would justify returning to steam.
The same principle applies, in different ways, to offshore wind, solar power and electric vehicles. Government support helped these technologies overcome enormous upfront costs and become viable at scale. They have moved well beyond proving that they can work; the legitimate debates now concern how quickly to expand them, how much public support they still require and which individual investments make economic sense.
China is already seeing the strategic value of those investments. Its massive buildout of renewable power, batteries and electric infrastructure has made it less vulnerable to the spike in oil prices caused by the Iran war. Successful long-term investments create resilience before crises arrive.
Ending future support for government-supported technologies can be a reasonable policy choice. Paying billions to reverse progress already achieved requires a clearly demonstrated benefit that justifies the added costs. The Trump administration has made no such case.
The United States needs more energy, a more capable military, modern infrastructure and the ability to compete technologically for decades to come. We have already paid billions to move forward. We should be investing in that progress, not buying our way back to where we started.
Jon Duffy is a retired naval officer. He writes about leadership and democracy.
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