The labor, towing, and environmental remediation cost of scrapping the ship is high and eats into scrap price. 1 cent is a quick and easy way for the Navy to wash its hands of it and offload the responsibility of dealing with it to someone else.

to avoid future costs...

but why not "one dollar" ? Surely an old aircraft carrier is worth at least one dollar---
which would be less humiliating than "one cent"--- and I presume the buyer could afford a dollar....


(In my family, when we transferred cars between us for basically NOTHING,
we never claimed the sale price was less than 'one dollar'.....
even though we had to pay the sales tax on that supposed dollar)