The maritime legislation commonly known as the Jones Act of 1920 requires vessels moving goods between U.S. ports to be U.S.-built, U.S.-flagged, and U.S.-crewed. Critics argue that it constrains the free market, raises costs for non-contiguous states and territories, discourages coastal shipping and has failed to preserve a robust U.S. Merchant Marine. They also point to wartime sealift shortages and Puerto Rico’s post-disaster supply challenges in 2017 as evidence that the law is outdated.
These criticisms deserve scrutiny, but they do not justify repeal.
The better question is whether the United States should reform the Jones Act as part of a broader maritime revival—or discard one of the few remaining statutory foundations for domestic maritime capacity.
An effective security barrier.
The United States is a maritime nation on a continental scale, not a seapower state wholly dependent on a large merchant fleet for daily economic survival. Road, rail and air transport carry much of the same cargo faster and at great scale.
Foreign-built vessels with non-U.S. crews may already enter U.S. waters when carrying cargo from foreign ports to U.S. destinations. Repeal would go further by allowing foreign-owned and foreign-crewed companies to conduct domestic carriage on inland waterways.
A Chinese-owned barge company operating on the Mississippi River might reduce some short-term costs, but the strategic tradeoff would be severe: a potential adversary would gain routine access to America’s deep interior transportation network.
Few object to comparable restrictions in domestic aviation and trucking. Maritime cabotage deserves the same strategic logic.
Sealift weakness argues for renewal
A central purpose of the U.S.-flagged merchant marine is support to global U.S. national security requirements. Jones Act vessels and crews form part of the pool that can augment Military Sealift Command and other government-controlled shipping in crisis. That task becomes far more complicated if the United States must first secure, inspect or remove foreign crews from ships needed for national defense.
U.S.-flagged vessels also operate under higher standards for safety, crew welfare and pollution control, making them more reliable instruments of national policy than cheaper foreign-flagged alternatives operating under looser regimes.
In conflict, the United States never has enough government-owned vessels to move supplies, munitions, vehicles, and other materiel to global destinations. That was true even during the 1991 Gulf War, when the United States benefited from late-Cold War funding and readiness.
Today’s merchant marine is less than one-quarter the size of its 1991 counterpart. That decline is not principally the fault of the Jones Act. It reflects deindustrialization, inadequate maritime policy and the absence of sustained government support since the mid-1980s.
Repeal would likely accelerate the decline by placing remaining U.S.-flag carriers in direct competition with lower-cost foreign operators, thereby driving out remaining U.S.-flag carriers rather than rebuilding the fleet.
Targeted fixes beat surrender
Like any long-standing statute, the Jones Act has weaknesses that require mitigation, but most are specific rather than systemic. Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico are subject to cabotage rules, yet foreign companies can ship directly to those locations from foreign ports without triggering Jones Act requirements.
On average, two-thirds of the ships calling at San Juan are foreign-flagged, and consumer prices are not appreciably different from those on the mainland. In disasters, the law can be waived to speed relief shipments, as occurred after Hurricane Maria in 2017. Recent Jones Act waivers in response to rising world oil prices have likewise not produced the savings that repeal advocates predicted. Targeted waivers and maritime investment are better tools than wholesale repeal.
The bipartisan SHIPS Act and a Trump administration executive order point toward a more serious answer: expand the U.S. commercial fleet without destroying the legal framework that sustains it.
Foreign investment, such as investment in existing U.S. yards like the Philadelphia Shipyard by South Korea’s Hanwha Group, can create American companies employing American workers and building ships in the United States. That is different from opening domestic coastal, intercoastal and riverine transport to foreign ownership and foreign crews.
Given China’s aggressive pursuit of transportation infrastructure worldwide, the United States should not surrender control of domestic maritime movement for marginal cost reductions. The secure movement of military supplies, equipment and personnel requires U.S.-flagged vessels crewed by U.S. mariners.
Reinvestment in U.S. shipbuilding, ship repair, and the mariner workforce is the right path to rebuilding U.S. maritime capacity. Repealing the Jones Act would not solve America’s maritime weakness; it would remove one of the few remaining supports for U.S.-controlled domestic shipping.
The strategic value of the Jones Act remains as important as it was after World War I, when the United States discovered that a weak merchant marine imposed enormous wartime costs. As Sen. Wesley Jones himself stated in 1920, the nation had “overlooked the terrible experience that came to us at the beginning of the world war… Our shipping could be done more cheaply by others, and so we had none.”
Reform is necessary. Repeal would be strategic malpractice.
