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Posted on 03/21/2026 8:22:05 AM PDT by daniel1212
President Donald Trump has waived the Jones Act for 60 days to mitigate supply disruptions resulting from conflict in the Middle East.
This raises a fundamental question: why do policymakers regularly suspend this law during emergencies yet leave it in place the rest of the time?
The Jones Act is an antiquated 106-year-old law officially known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 that places draconian restrictions on the use of ships to transport goods within the United States. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the waiver allowing the use of foreign vessels to transport goods “will allow vital resources like oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and coal to flow freely to U.S. ports for sixty days.”
The Jones Act requires that goods transported domestically over water use ships that are primarily U.S.-owned, U.S.-crewed, and U.S.-built. According to the federal government, the law’s goal is to create a coastwise monopoly for shipping. Similar restrictions do not apply to domestic cargo transportation via land or air.
The new Jones Act waiver is a good reminder of how protectionist laws like the Jones Act weaken U.S. national security and economic resilience. For example:
The U.S. International Trade Commission reports that the Jones Act increases the cost to ship rice from the continental United States to Puerto Rico, encouraging imports from China and elsewhere.
The Farm Bureau has endorsed a Jones Act waiver to facilitate domestic shipments of fertilizer.
Similarly, the Agriculture Retailers Association has called for the Jones Act to be abolished to expedite domestic transportation of agricultural inputs like fertilizer.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has observed that “America produces liquefied natural gas (LNG), but we can’t ship it to other American ports due to hundred-year-old red tape. States in need of LNG are forced to rely on Russia for their energy supply.”
A 2023 study calculated that eliminating the Jones Act would reduce East Coast gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel prices.
As National Taxpayers Union Foundation has documented, the federal government has repeatedly waived the Jones Act to ease shipping cost and facilitate America’s response to national emergencies including:
Hurricane Katrina (2005)
Hurricane Rita (2005)
Libyan Crisis (2011)
Hurricanes Harvey and Irma (2017)
Puerto Rico (2017)
Colonial Pipeline (2021)
Hurricane Fiona (2022)
Middle East conflict (2026)
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“The Jones Act requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried on ships that have been constructed in the United States and that fly the U.S. flag, are owned by U.S. citizens, and are crewed by U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents.”
(From Wikipedia)
l’ll play the devil’s advocate here, and defend the Jones Act.
The US had a huge merchant marine fleet before and during WW2. No longer. The Jones Act protects what’s left of that fleet.
Without the Jones Act, you’d have foreign ships carrying water-borne cargo within the US. Is that an acceptable thing, or is it a national security risk?
I’ve seen estimates that The Jones Act costs the US billions of dollars in lost revenue. If a state wants to ship something to another state or along the rivers, it must do so using a very small fleet. The costs are prohibitive. Looking at who owns the ships and what nationality crews them looks good only from that one perspective. Look at the all-encompassing picture and see how much we are losing because of that one perspective. There needs to be a cost benefit analysis. What we are missing is the other side of the equation, the lost revenue from using foreign carriers, is never considered.
We have all foreign ships already transporting to the US.
This is just moving stuff between US ports.
It seems unwise, when foreign vessels can bring their stuff here, without issue, but a question to ask is why would we want foreign ships to take out stuff to another US port? That brings up the question of how did our ownshipping become so laden with costs?
> This is just moving stuff between US ports. <
Right. But I think my comments still stand. A significant amount of cargo moves between US ports. Allow foreign ships to do that, and we would have no merchant marine at all.
Plus consider shipping on, say, the Great Lakes. Do we really want foreign ships doing that?
> That brings up the question of how did our own shipping become so laden with costs? <
Excellent question. US-flagged ships operate under many rules. Safety rules, pay rules, etc. Foreign ships do not have those constraints.
Is the cheaper goods trade-off worth it? Just asking.
Those foreign flags don't have Navies or have to provide protections. Just look at how many carriers are established in the Caribbean, purely for taxes. They don't any concerns for protective expensive or labor concerns.
> There needs to be a cost benefit analysis. <
You make some good points. Not saying you favored it, but those kinds of analyses is what got the shelves of Walmart filled with foreign junk while American factories were abandoned.
I don’t think there’s an easy solution to any of this. No one in this country wants to move an inch. Not the unions, not the government regulators, not the taxing authorities.
So the choice becomes between either a wildly expensive US source or a cheap foreign source.
🙁
“That’s also because our Navy provides protection thru out the world to all passages. Those foreign crews get safe passage while we subsidize the world. “
You touch on a good point. Trump has guaranteed insurance to ships willing to transit the Strait of Hormuz. That might provide the genesis of American shipping insurance. One benefit of sailing with American Insurance might be we prevent piracy and take action when an insured ship is detained or seized. Whereas if the ship is foreign and sailing under, say, Lloyds of London or other insurance, they’re out of luck.
I think there are a whole lot of ways to go if Congress can get over the union labor lobby which has thus far prevented them from doing away with the Jones Act. I’m sure Trump sees the problem better than anyone else who has been in that office. I think, other than Reagan, he’s the only other president in my lifetime who put America first.
“So the choice becomes between either a wildly expensive US source or a cheap foreign source.”
Also, a Western farmer can’t ship grain over water unless he pays the Union rate or he uses a foreign ship. Shipping under the present rules means his grain price is easily beaten by a foreign supplier. His only choice to keep his price competitive is to ship the grain overseas.
I’m not disagreeing with you totally. I’m saying there needs to be a wholistic analysis. Other laws could be made to cover the many smaller issues that would arise.
Of course, even more bizarre in the first place, is California Democrats killing oil exploration, production, recovery and refining in Californian then importing gasoline from other states and routing it through the Bahamas. California Democrats are pretending to "do something" about climate by the ruse of ending petroleum operations in California, yet continuing to consume the same amount of gasoline, just from different origin at much higher prices.
U.S.-refined gasoline (or gasoline blendstocks) from Gulf Coast refineries — primarily in Texas and Louisiana, such as Phillips 66 are routed through the Bahamas as a deliberate workaround to the Jones Act (the Merchant Marine Act of 1920).
There are only about 55 Jones Act-compliant product tankers in the world (versus thousands of foreign-flagged ones), so chartering one is extremely expensive — often 3–4 times (or more) the cost of a foreign tanker. Direct Gulf-to-California shipments are therefore prohibitively costly, especially with no cross-country pipelines to move the fuel by land.
The step-by-step loophole
The result: California receives the fuel without ever using a rare/expensive Jones Act tanker for the domestic portion of the trip.
This is a classic example of how companies find expensive ways around extreme Democrat one-party governance. The practice is expected to continue as long as California’s refinery capacity keeps shrinking and the Jones Act remains in place.
Your counter-example with the Western farmer is a good one. A sensible Congress should be able to sort this all out.
But when was the last time we had a sensible Congress?
Maybe never?
Jones Act restrictions don't apply to land and air-borne cargo, and amount of US land and air routes far exceeds amount US water routes. If national security is thesis for maintaining the Act, why no calls for similarly restricting foreign transportation over US land and air?
They don’t have to get rid of the Jones act, just crew them with illegal aliens. They work cheapest.
Having said that, I would support a change in the existing legislation to provide permanent waivers for any shipping between U.S. ports that require vessels to cross international waters. This would apply to states and territories outside the contiguous United States — Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, etc.
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