Navy Axes Biden-Era Sub Overhaul As Costs Balloon to $3B

By Ward Clark | 1:03 PM on April 10, 2026

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The Los-Angeles class attack submarine USS Boise (SSN-764) has been alongside the dock for repairs since 2015. Repairs were slated to begin in 2016, but they didn't; finally, in 2024, under the Biden administration, a $1.2 billion contract was issued to cover an overhaul of the submarine.

Now the Navy is cancelling that contract. Secretary of the Navy John Phelan described it as "cutting our losses."

The Navy is canceling a long-delayed overhaul of the USS Boise after costs ballooned to nearly $3 billion, with Secretary of the Navy John Phelan saying the submarine no longer made financial or strategic sense to repair.
In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, Phelan said the Los Angeles-class attack submarine had already consumed roughly $800 million and would require another $1.9 billion to complete — despite offering only about 20% of its remaining service life. Instead, the Navy plans to redirect funding and skilled labor toward building and delivering newer Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines, part of a broader push to accelerate ship production and overhaul troubled acquisition programs.
"At some point, you just cut your losses and move on," Phelan said.

The Boise has not only been alongside the dock since 2015, but the boat's operational certification was pulled in 2016, and in 2017, it lost its certification to dive. $800 million has already been spent on the boat, which is expected to have only 20 percent of its service life left.

The "moving on" will be reallocating resources away from the Cold War-era Boise and into newer, more versatile boats.

"One of our big constraints in our shipyards, particularly in submarine building, is labor and engineering talent," Phelan said. "We have a lot of that dedicated to this, which we could free up and put onto the Virginia-class submarine or Columbia and try to shift the schedule left on those."
He argued the overhaul no longer made sense from a return-on-investment perspective, comparing the cost of repairing the aging submarine to building a new one.
"The Boise represents 65% of the cost of a new Virginia-class submarine, yet it only delivers 20% of the remaining service life," Phelan said, adding that equates to roughly three deployments.

That would seem to make sense, money-wise.

Watch: US Submarine Sinks Iranian Warship by Torpedo, a First Since World War II

The Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarines, also known as the 688 class, first entered service in 1976, with the last one built in 1996. There are still 23 688-class boats still in service, making up almost half of the United States force of nuclear fast-attack submarines. They are being gradually replaced by the Virginia class. The Los Angeles class was built for Cold War-era, open ocean operations, where the Virginia class is adapted more for a range of not only open-ocean operation but also inshore intelligence-gathering and as a cruise missile platform. 32 are planned.

So, it looks like the USS Boise will become, as the saying goes, razor blades - lots and lots of razor blades. What's left of the $1.2 billion Biden-era repair program will instead go towards newer, more modern boats. That would seem to make good sense.

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