Opinion: The Case for the Jones Act: American Commerce, Workers, Security

ByJames L. Henry – For more than 130 days, President Trump has waived the Jones Act, letting foreign ships carry cargo between American ports. Supporters of the waiver call this free trade.

It isn’t. 

Moving oil from Texas to New Jersey is domestic commerce, not trade, any more than a UPS truck crossing state lines is trade. Once you accept the “trade” framing, you’ve already lost the argument. This is a domestic commerce rule, not a trade barrier, and it shouldn’t be treated as one.

Waiver advocates also argue the Jones Act fleet is fully booked anyway, so the waiver costs nothing. That’s false. Vessels have sat idle for months waiting for work, brokers report they can’t secure contracts for clients, and an analysis by Navigistics Consulting found that in the waiver’s first 60 days, nearly 90% of the diverted voyages could have been handled by Jones Act vessels.

The harm is real. It just hasn’t been tallied until now. 

The American maritime industry commissioned PwC, one of the Big 4 accounting firms, to model what a long-term waiver would cost. 

The findings: up to 21,650 direct maritime jobs at risk, and 133,700 total jobs once supply-chain and induced effects are counted. Up to $12.2 billion in annual labor income exposed. Up to $26.5 billion in shipbuilding demand lost over ten years. Up to $2.6 billion in annual capital investment redirected abroad. Up to $1.8 billion in federal, state, and local tax revenue gone. 

These are conservative, publicly sourced numbers from the side that bothered to show its work. The pro-waiver camp has produced nothing comparable. When one side of the ledger is concrete, and the other is speculative, you don’t govern by betting on the speculation.

President Trump built his political career opposing the outsourcing of American jobs. This waiver is outsourcing in reverse: instead of sending jobs abroad, it imports foreign crews to do American jobs, on American waterways, moving American cargo between American ports — while the wages, investment, and tax revenue those jobs generate flow overseas. 

That’s outsourcing on water.

It also hands ground to Beijing. China dominates global shipbuilding and controls a growing share of world shipping tonnage. A long-term waiver opens American domestic trade lanes to Chinese-built and Chinese-owned vessels, at the very moment Washington is trying to reduce Chinese economic leverage. You cannot rebuild American shipbuilding capacity while handing the commercial demand that justifies it to foreign, and increasingly Chinese, yards. 

That undercuts the administration’s own Maritime Action Plan, which calls for waking up America’s history of shipbuilding, expanding the U.S.-flag fleet, and growing the mariner workforce. Shipyards don’t hold capacity on hope, and investors don’t fund vessels when the demand base has been given away.

The consumer-price argument, that the Jones Act raises costs in Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico, deserves a real answer, not a dismissal. 

The honest one: shipping is one input among many; pass-through to retail prices is uncertain and route-specific, and even PwC’s own report concedes the consumer benefits can’t be credibly quantified one way or the other with public data. Where genuine supply constraints exist on specific routes, targeted Section 501B waivers, the tool used historically, can address them without dismantling the entire domestic maritime industry.

There’s also a hard security case. USTRANSCOM, Military Sealift Command, and the Maritime Administration have all stated on the record that the commercial fleet, shipyards, and trained mariners are essential to wartime sealift, because the Navy lacks the organic capacity to move what a conflict would require. Hollow out that base in peacetime and it won’t be there when it’s needed. Markets don’t price national security readiness, because they can’t.

Three audiences need to hear this. 

The President should reject the claim this is a trade regulation. This is the same principle that keeps foreign airlines off domestic routes and foreign firms out of nuclear plants. 

Members of Congress should recognize that maritime workers aren’t asking for a subsidy, only not to be undercut by foreign competition inside their own country. 

And free-trade skeptics should redirect that fight to the border, on tariffs and market access, because the Jones Act was never a trade issue to begin with.

The sovereignty argument, the security argument, and the plain fact that this isn’t trade should each be enough on their own. Together, they leave no case for a long-term waiver.

James L. Henry serves as Chairman at the Transportation Institute.

Read the report: Potential Effects of a Long-Term Waiver of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920

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