The Navy Has Stopped Calling It the USS Doris Miller. Internally, It Is Just CVN-81.

Inside the Navy, the ship is no longer being called by its name. Officials working on the Ford-class aircraft carrier designated CVN-81 have stopped using the words "USS Doris Miller" in internal discussions and refer to the vessel only by its hull number, according to three sources familiar with the deliberations who spoke to CNN. The reason, those sources said, is that Navy leadership is weighing whether to take the ship's name away from a Black mess attendant who fought back at Pearl Harbor and give it to the sitting president of the United States.

Doris Miller was 22 years old and working in the galley of the battleship USS West Virginia on the morning of December 7, 1941. Japanese torpedoes tore into the ship's port side. Miller, who as a Black sailor was barred from gunnery training, carried wounded shipmates out of the line of fire, helped pull the mortally wounded captain from the bridge, and then manned a .50-caliber anti-aircraft gun he had never been taught to operate until the ammunition ran out. Admiral Chester Nimitz pinned the Navy Cross on him in May 1942, the first time the decoration had gone to an African American sailor. Miller died in November 1943, when a Japanese submarine sank the escort carrier USS Liscome Bay in the Pacific.

The Navy announced in January 2020 that CVN-81 would carry his name — the first aircraft carrier ever named for an enlisted sailor, and the first named for an African American. The ship is not expected to be delivered until 2034, but the naming question is coming due: the Navy faces a keel-laying ceremony scheduled for the end of 2026, and a hull without a settled name is an awkward thing to lay down in public.

According to the sources, the office of acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao has been reviewing updated naming guidance that would allow warships to be named for sitting presidents. That has never happened with a carrier. Ships named for presidents — the Gerald R. Ford, the George H.W. Bush, the Ronald Reagan — have historically carried the names of men who had left office, and in most cases had died. Naming a first-in-class or follow-on carrier for an incumbent would break with a century of Navy practice.

Pentagon officials, asked directly about the reporting, said they had nothing official to announce. The Navy has not issued an on-the-record statement naming a new namesake for CVN-81, and no final decision has been made public. What the sources describe is an internal review that has already changed how the ship is discussed inside the building.

The Navy is not proposing to erase Miller entirely. According to the reporting, service leadership is recommending him for the Medal of Honor — the nation's highest military decoration, which advocates and members of Congress have sought for him for decades — and is considering attaching his name to a different vessel. Whether a smaller ship and a posthumous medal would satisfy the families, veterans' groups and lawmakers who campaigned for the carrier name is another question. Miller was from Waco, Texas, and local officials there have spent years building the naming into the city's identity.

The episode lands in the middle of a broader fight over names and monuments in the second Trump administration, which has already renamed federal buildings, reversed base renamings recommended by a congressional commission, and this week signed an executive order declaring Lake Ontario would be known as "Lake America." A Justice Department filing this week suggested the Kennedy Center could face demolition if a judge blocks a renovation plan that would add the president's name to the building. The carrier decision, if it comes, will be the most consequential of the set: a warship's name stays on the hull for half a century.