So you're changing the goalposts here and asking for defense of a statement the post doesn't make. The statement was that "the US surface Navy has...been deferring maintenance," not that it was cutting the budget for maintenance.

There is no smoking gun of "aha! you cut funds for needed repairs!" here - just a series of operational and organizational priorities that have resulted in ships being at sea for longer and longer deployments, and resources allocated to prestige projects like carriers, instead of resolving the less sexy issue of manpower, and lack of "work horse" destroyers in the fleet.

ProPublica has a good piece going into some of the details of this if you'd like to know more, specifically as it regards the 7th Fleet.

https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/us-navy-crash...