A Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarine (Image: AAP/Richard Wainwright)

The turmoil in the US Congress could hamper progress on the AUKUS deal, an expert says.

Republican speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted from his seat on Wednesday in a vote forced by hard-right conservatives that threw the House of Representatives into gridlock and uncertainty. 

The Congress needs to sign off the proposed sale of Virginia-class submarines to Australia, but even before the sacking of McCarthy, there was some uncertainty about when that could happen. A recent research paper presented to the Congress posed the question whether the decision could be “deferred until 2024 or later”, raising the prospect the sign-off could happen during, or after, the 2024 presidential election. 

“We’re looking at the disintegration of the Republican Congress with the ouster of speaker McCarthy, which makes it very difficult for the Republicans to come to any kind of consensus here,” ANU Strategic and Defence Studies Centre Honorary Professor Leszek Buszynski told Crikey. 

“It looks like the whole thing could be caught up in congressional chaos at the moment. It’s entirely possible that Congress will face a deadlock. All of this is very much up in the air, in which case AUKUS could be sidelined or could get lost in the process.”

The research paper that raised the prospect of postponing the decision was published by the Congressional Research Service late last month. It speculated the decision may be possible to postpone beyond 2023, which would make “more information available to Congress about the details on specific elements of the proposed Pillar 1 pathway”.

Pillar 1 is a trilateral effort between Australia, the UK and the US to allow Australia to acquire the nuclear-powered Virginia-class submarines. The other element of AUKUS, Pillar 2, is focused on technology cooperation. 

The research paper noted that if Congress signed off on Pillar 1 this year, it would mean “sending a signal of alliance solidarity and deterrence to China sooner rather than later”. 

It comes after 25 Republicans sent a letter to US President Joe Biden in July urging him to increase funding for the country’s submarine fleet.

“We support the vision of the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) partnership and its potential to change the strategic landscape in the Indo-Pacific. The AUKUS agreement is vitally important, but we must simultaneously protect US national security,” the politicians said in the letter, according to Reuters.

The Republicans added that selling three attack submarines to Australia would “unacceptably weaken” the US fleet.