The heads of the House and Senate subcommittees with oversight of Navy shipbuilding introduced legislation on Thursday that would set a 355-ship Navy as U.S. policy. The legislation has no statutory teeth — Congress still would need to approve funding to build the ships — but it sends a message that lawmakers support the buildup.

The Navy already has set a goal of getting to 355 ships from the 276 it has now. And President Donald Trump has called for a 350-ship Navy.

"The goal of a 355-ship Navy is a consensus strategy going back to 2015 when 'A Cooperative Strategy on 21st Century Seapower' was jointly issued by the chiefs of the nation's sea services, and reinforced by the 2016 Force Structure Assessment and the February 2017 Accelerated Fleet Plan. Incorporating this goal in the 2017 NDAA is a logical next step and I fully support its enactment," U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, said in a statement.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has signed on as a cosponsor of the legislation. "I'm proud to join with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to refocus our efforts on achieving this goal, particularly ensuring our undersea capabilities continue to remain one of our greatest asymmetric assets," he said in a statement.

In the years ahead, lawmakers will need to figure out how to reach 355 ships and how to pay for the buildup, which a Congressional Budget Office report found would cost, on average, $26.6 billion a year over the next 30 years. That's more than 60 percent above the average amount that Congress has appropriated for shipbuilding over the past 30 years.