U.S. Navy and Defense Procurement

NPR reports that the Navy’s newest and most expensive aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, has been plagued by chronic sewage system breakdowns throughout its current seven‑month deployment off Venezuela, where it serves as the centerpiece of President Trump’s flotilla interdicting Venezuelan oil tankers. Internal emails and documents obtained via FOIA show the ship’s Vacuum Collection, Holding and Transfer (VCHT) system—adapted from cruise‑ship designs and already flagged by the GAO in 2020 as undersized and poorly engineered—has required outside assistance 42 times since 2023, with 32 of those calls in 2025 and 12 since this deployment began in June. One March 18, 2025 engineering email reported 205 breakdowns in four days and said hull‑maintenance technicians were working 19‑hour days trying to keep up, while routine messages to crew warn whole "zones" of toilets will lose suction for hours as sailors hunt for vacuum leaks. The documents also reveal that misuse by a young crew—everything from T‑shirts and rope to improper paper products flushed into the system—worsens a design that uses narrow vacuum piping and easily dislodged toilet valves, repeatedly knocking entire sections of heads offline for the 4,600 sailors aboard. The continuing failures on a $13 billion carrier already at sea raise fresh questions about Navy procurement decisions, maintenance burdens and real‑world readiness at a time when the Ford is being used as a visible symbol of U.S. power in the Caribbean.