Part of the problem is that the Navy can't reduce it's scope. Congress sets in law a lot of requirements. For example, the Navy has to have 11 large aircraft carriers, which is more than the rest of the world combined. This led to shell games when the Ford was behind in construction and doesn't allow the Navy to look at alternate force constructs such as more smaller carriers or focusing more on subs. Congress does this with all the branches, just look at why A-10s are still flying or the Abrams are still being built at like two a year. Now, this isn't always a bad thing. The services have not always done a great job transitioning to new technology, and have messed up their financing so bad they can't pass an audit, so a little extra oversight does make sense.

US GDP (nominal) in 2001: USD$10.6T

US GDP (nominal) in 2021: USD$23T

What percent was spent on capital budgets in 2001 vs 2021? The navy is currently undergoing building 4 or 5 major ship replacement cycles, replacing all of its aircraft (Top 10 airforce in the world), etc. My guess is that most of that budget is mandated by congress for that rather than for bottom paint on supply ships.

I looked briefly, and it's annoyingly hard to find summaries of the passed (not proposed) NDAA for a specific year, with top line and categorized breakdowns.

I think that’s not keeping up with inflation over the same period?

Trying to gently improve public discourse, I’d suggest that we don’t need to speculate when something is so easy to look up:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%24160B+in+2022+convert...

It is all meaningless speculation. There is no reason that broadly measured inflation statistics have any relevance to price increases specific to materials and labor required for the subject at hand, such as ship building or operations of a navy.

$100 > $80.

Meta: (1) Oh, that's cool, using Wolfram to look up inflation data! I'll try to remember that.

(2) "Trying to gently... I'd suggest..." strikes me the same as "With the greatest respect..." Maybe just post the link next time.

There’s only been about 60% inflation since 2001, so assuming the above numbers are correct then that’s outpacing inflation.

Cumulative inflation is 62% over that period according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

To reply to those saying CPI inflation is up 60% over the period: S&P500 is a better measure of inflation, up 3x over the period, so navy budget roughly keeping pace.