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When the Trump administration announced a 60-day waiver of the Jones Act in March, I was thrilled for a moment.
For those who haven’t sat next to me at a dinner party, the Jones Act is a World War I-era shipping law requiring goods moved by water between two U.S. ports to travel on vessels that are U.S.-built, U.S.-flagged, and crewed by Americans. For over a century, the Jones Act has pushed freight off boats onto higher-emission trains and trucks, impeded climate change responses such as offshore wind and disaster recovery, and raised prices for Americans. Not yet reading the fine print of the waiver, I assumed we’d get an amazing experiment where we could see how a free market for American shipping would work. We’d unleash boats across the country, slash emissions, and curb wartime inflation. We might even get some momentum to repeal the law altogether.
Then, as I sat down in April to research more deeply for The Pebble, I discovered the catch.
Trump’s waiver was not a blanket suspension as I had naively assumed. On April 16, his administration published a list of products “potentially covered” by the waiver. It was a laundry list of hundreds of fossil fuels, petrochemicals, agricultural inputs, and other polluting products. The majority of America’s cargo would not be granted an exemption.
Quickly thereafter, I discovered that the president may even be breaking the law. Congress gave presidents the power to waive the Jones Act during crises, but only when they determine it is needed to address an “immediate adverse effect on military operations.” Many of the fossil fuels and petrochemicals on the covered products list are difficult to connect to current disruptions or immediate military need, while several non-fossil products with a far stronger claim to national-defense relevance are completely omitted. Waiving the Jones Act to stabilize energy markets may be a worthy goal, but Congress never gave the president the authority to do that. Yet, White House spokespeople are openly admitting this to be the goal, with seemingly no pushback from a purely legal standpoint.
As I published in RealClearEnergy on April 23, Trump’s waiver is a fossil fuel handout. It demonstrates that Washington knows the Jones Act is costly but will only waive it for preferred industries at the expense of the climate, free markets, and long-term national security. The next day, Trump extended the waiver for another 90 days, placing its end date in mid-August. Since then, many of my fellow Jones Act critics have applauded the waivers, trying to initiate momentum for an all-out repeal.
I agree that the law should be repealed, and will not complain if that’s where this momentum leads. But supporting Trump’s waiver is not the same as opposing the Jones Act. The Jones Act picks winners and losers by shielding American shipbuilders while imposing higher costs on consumers, the climate, and the economy. Trump’s waiver picks winners and losers too, illegally steering relief to fossil-fuel and petrochemical interests while preserving the same broken system for everyone else. Whether your priority is climate, free markets, or basic common sense, neither side of that trade is worth defending. Only Congress can deliver the real solution: repeal.