Trump names Hung Cao as Navy secretary while the Lincoln sits in Thailand

President Donald Trump said on 1 September that he will nominate Hung Cao, the acting Navy secretary, to hold the job on a permanent basis. The Senate has to confirm him.

Cao has run the department since John Phelan left in late April. Trump called him a warrior on Truth Social and told the Senate to confirm him quickly so he could continue work begun over the past four months. Cao called the nomination the honour of a lifetime.

From a 1975 airlift to the E-ring

Cao came to the United States as a child when the South Vietnamese government collapsed in 1975. He spent more than 25 years in the Navy as a diver and explosive-ordnance disposal officer, served with special-operations units in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, and commanded the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center in Panama City. He retired as a captain in 2021, then ran for the House in Virginia in 2022 and for the Senate in 2024. He lost both races. He later served as Navy undersecretary before the acting secretary's job.

He is closer to Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth than Phelan was. Phelan had not served in uniform. Cao has, and he has spent the acting months on files that please the current building: returning to duty sailors who refused the earlier Covid vaccine mandate, and declining to criticise a Blue Angels pass so low over a Florida beach that chairs and tents left the sand.

The fleet he would inherit

The nomination arrived in the same week the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln tied up in Thailand after 286 days away from home and 200 days in a combat zone for the Iran war. Democratic members of Congress had already asked about conditions and mental health on that ship. Cao has been the civilian at the top of the Navy while that cruise ran long.

A Navy secretary hires and fires senior officers, signs the shipbuilding budget that goes to Congress, and answers for accidents, recruiting and industrial-base delays. The United States is fighting a war that depends on carriers, destroyers and logistics ships that have been at sea for months. Confirmation hearings will not be a biography seminar. Senators will ask how many more 200-day combat stretches the force can take, what the Lincoln cruise did to the hull and the crew, and whether the shipbuilding accounts match the war the White House says it is fighting.

Cao's refugee story and his EOD years will be recited in the opening statements. The questions that matter sit in the Lincoln's deck log and in the yards that are late on the next generation of ships. The Senate can confirm him quickly, as Trump asked, or it can use the hearing to put those logs on the record. Either way, the acting phase is now a nomination.