Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) walked into Wednesday's Senate Armed Services Committee hearing with a plan: Corner acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao over reports of broken toilets and food shortages aboard Navy ships, and make him look like a man who blew off his own sailors to run cover for the administration.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle stepped in and confirmed what Cao had been saying: A significant portion of the toilet problem came down to misuse, the Navy knew it, and the service had already responded. Kaine had spent his hearing time building a case against a man who turned out to be largely correct.
(Warning: Language)
Wow. Hillary’s former running mate, Sen. @timkaine, accused Navy Secretary @HungCao_VA of lying and got publicly stuffed into a locker by CNO Adm. Caudle.
Cao said legacy media inflated reports of food shortages and broken toilets into fake news.
Kaine called Cao a liar and suggested he was sweeping problems under the toilet mat.
Then Caudle stepped in and explained that one head going down equals about 1% of roughly 6 million turd flushes — which, at sea, is not a scandal. It’s an engineering miracle.
My suggestion? Let’s get Timmy a gold-plated porta-potty, strap him to it for safety, and put the thing on a roller coaster so he can experience 90 seconds of shipboard reality while he’s taking a sh!t.
I don’t mean to be crude but Tim Kaine deserves it. Nothing. NOTHING. Pisses off sailors more than when they are working to keep sewage systems working and some puke in a suit and tie who’s never stood under a leaking sh!tter valve calls to give the ship a hard time.
Seriously, toilet systems aboard ship were the bane of my existence as Chief Mate. I’ve been completely covered in human waste multiple times and would have traded my left nut for a 1% failure rate. The Admiral’s right. Hung Cao is telling the truth. It’s fake news and the truth is a miracle.
And if I was Hung I’d give every single engineer on that ship who turned a toilet wrench on the USS Ford a medal for a job well done!
BZ to Admiral Caudle for shutting this nonsense down.
Caudle explained that the system works on the same vacuum principle as aircraft lavatories — effective but unforgiving when sailors put things in it that do not belong there. On a ship with 5,000 people sharing a small number of heads over a ten-month deployment, that is not a trivial behavioral challenge.
“It is more susceptible to misuse, like an airplane’s vacuum drag system. So, whether or not I can put things in it, sailor-proof that I need to talk to the design engineers, but I would say the fact that the time it’s offline, sir, from the time it clogs to offline is a less than 1 percent problem of its overall use.”
Kaine, perhaps hoping Caudle would soften the answer if asked to repeat it, then asked whether his testimony was that most of the problem resulted from misuse. Caudle did not soften anything.
“There’s no question to the extent we actually started standing a watch in our heads to ensure people complied with the procedures to keep it from being misused, so the system is again a vacuum drag system, and whether or not that’s robust enough for sailors, I can look at.”
Sailor complaints about ship conditions are not fabricated, and nobody at that hearing claimed they were. What the testimony did was complicate the clean narrative Kaine was selling: that the Navy had broken toilets, Cao knew it, and Cao lied about it. The reality Caudle described is messier and more human: Sailors on long deployments were misusing a system that cannot handle misuse, and the Navy's fix was to post a watchstander at the door.
Caudle also has no particular reason to protect Cao. He is not a political appointee; he did not come to that hearing to run damage control, and his credibility rests entirely on being straight with Congress. When he backed Cao's version of events, that meant something, and Kaine had no follow-up that could undo it.
The underlying readiness question does not disappear just because misuse was a factor. A system that can be disabled by a T-shirt or a rag on a ship with thousands of crew members may simply not be the right system for that environment, and Caudle said as much when he offered to look at whether it is "robust enough for sailors." That is worth a serious follow-up, because ships need working plumbing.
Kaine came to that hearing to make Cao look like a man who dismissed his sailors and lied to Congress about it. What he got instead was the Navy's top admiral on the record confirming the misuse problem, describing the bathroom watch program, and flagging the system for a possible redesign review. Kaine set the trap, and Caudle walked right past it without noticing it was there.
Kaine wanted a hearing about neglect. He got testimony about vacuum toilets and bathroom sentries. The story that came out of that bathroom is not the one he brought in.
https://redstate.com/ben-smith/2026/05/20/tim-kaine-tried-to-flush-hung-cao-then-the-navys-top-admiral-clogged-the-narrative-n2202518
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