The Quiet Aftermath of Trump’s Jones Act Waiver
The most consequential shipping policy experiment in a century is about to hit its deadline. In March, the Trump administration issued a waiver of the Jones Act, the century-old law requiring that commodities moving between U.S. ports travel on vessels built, owned, and crewed by Americans, in a bid to tame fuel prices as the Iran war sent crude soaring. What was announced as a 60-day measure was extended by 90 days in April, making it the broadest suspension of the Jones Act in its history and a real-world test of whether easing the restrictions can reduce fuel transportation costs. Now, with the waiver set to expire in mid-August and Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, and 50 other House Republicans signing a letter asking President Trump to let it lapse as scheduled, the fight has shifted from whether to suspend the law to what the suspension actually demonstrated.
The results, depending on where you sit, prove everything or nothing. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that California drivers, Gulf Coast refiners, and Puerto Ricans have all benefited from the suspension, and the waiver opened up supply routes that barely exist under normal conditions, with jet fuel moving from the East Coast to the West Coast, propane from Texas and Pennsylvania to Puerto Rico, gasoline from Texas to Hawaii, and jet fuel from Louisiana to Alaska. But a Reuters analysis found the waiver had little impact on high domestic gasoline prices, with refiners including Valero and Phillips 66 using the exemption about 50 times in the first two months to move 2.6 million barrels of crude and 7.5 million barrels of fuel, volumes that amount to roughly 84,000 barrels per day against the 8.75 million barrels the country consumes daily. Part of the problem was circular: the same crisis that prompted the waiver also constrained the fix, since rates for available foreign-flagged tankers were elevated because many ships were trapped inside the Strait of Hormuz.
Both camps are reading those numbers as vindication. Jones Act critics say the waiver’s repeated use signals real demand for more tanker capacity, while the domestic maritime industry sees an existential threat, with the American Maritime Partnership calling the extension “an affront to hundreds of thousands of hardworking Americans” that undermines the goal of restoring U.S. maritime strength.
Ryan Dooley of Boston Ocean Shipping Lines argues that both sides are missing the operational reality underneath the policy fight, starting with the fact that a waiver changes what’s legal on the water without changing anything on land.
“Changing the Jones Act doesn’t change the shoreside infrastructure designed to accommodate bulk commodities, such as oil,” Dooley said. “It’s the equivalent of saying that you want more cars to fit in a parking lot by changing the size of the car and not changing the number of parking spots in the lot.”
That framing helps explain why the waiver’s real-world impact underwhelmed relative to the political noise around it. But Dooley’s more interesting argument is about what should replace the current cycle of crisis, waiver, and expiration. Rather than suspending the law cargo by cargo every time prices spike, he argues, Washington should make it dramatically easier to join the Jones Act fleet in the first place.
“The best way to improve the Jones Act would be not general waivers on specific cargoes, but create windows of time where companies could file in the U.S. and get a waiver to bring their ships over from foreign build,” he said. “The way to increase U.S. maritime is not by boxing out everybody. It’s by making it easier for everyone to convert over to the Jones Act.”
His model is disarmingly simple: “My example would be like when the library does forgiveness day and you can return any overdue books for no money. Declare a one-month window where any company can get Jones Act certified by converting over the company ownership, flag, and crew to U.S., and they will get a one-time waiver that will be effective as long as they are running that ship to accommodate the Jones Act.”
The proposal threads a needle the current debate hasn’t. It preserves the law’s core requirements of American ownership, flag, and crew, which is what the maritime lobby is actually defending, while attacking the fleet-size constraint that critics blame for high shipping costs, and it does so by growing the protected fleet rather than bypassing it. Whether the shipbuilding industry, whose U.S.-build requirement is the one piece Dooley’s conversion window would waive, could accept that trade is the open question.
What’s certain is that the mid-August expiration forces a decision either way, and the stakes reach well beyond fuel. Debate about the merits of the century-old law is likely to intensify ahead of the deadline, and the White House’s push to dampen politically sensitive fuel prices ahead of November’s midterm elections, where affordability is expected to be a defining issue, means the Jones Act is unlikely to fade back into obscurity no matter which way the decision goes. The experiment happened. The argument over what it proved is just getting started.
