Another energy crisis, another Jones Act waiver, and—predictably—another round of demands to repeal it. Every emergency should instead prompt us to question why the law exists and how it can be reformed for the modern world.
The Jones Act, a cabotage law, generally requires cargo moved between domestic ports to travel on ships built in the United States, flying the U.S. flag, and operated by American crews. America’s maritime system, vital to national security, is also part of the nation’s transportation infrastructure. Unlike airports, highways, and railroads, ships often operate out of sight from the public and are therefore easily ignored and often misunderstood. Yet American vessels move essential fuels, feedstocks, and bulk materials like fertilizer that sustain modern life. We would not respond to weakness in our airports by turning them over wholesale to foreign control. Those who would repeal the Jones Act are, in effect, asking America to surrender control over domestic maritime infrastructure.
The Jones Act was born from a lesson of World War I: A great power cannot assume dependence on foreign ships when commerce is disrupted or war arrives, and merchant ships are needed to move troops and materiel. Back then, Congress wanted a U.S. merchant marine—not just ships, but the yards to build and repair them and the mariners to crew them—because maritime capacity was understood as part of national defense. Congress wanted a base of ships, mariners and shipbuilding capacity that could be called on in peace and war. That is why the merchant marine is called the nation’s “fourth arm of defense.”
The Jones Act was never designed as the cheapest way to move cargo between domestic ports. It was created to preserve strategic maritime capacity. That hardly makes the U.S. an outlier; more than 100 countries maintain some form of cabotage law. Critics miss that when they fault it for raising shipping costs. Those costs are the price of maintaining domestic control over a critical industry that underpins energy security, domestic commerce and, in a crisis, national defense.
The strongest criticism of the Jones Act is not ideological. It is practical. It has not, in recent years, produced the maritime strength America should have. That criticism has force. The United States lacks the shipyard depth, mariner pool and fleet capacity it should have. But it does not follow that repeal is the answer. It is more likely that without the Jones Act, we would have fewer trained mariners, weaker domestic control and greater dependence on foreign-built and foreign-flagged vessels.
The risk is not theoretical. Global shipbuilding is concentrated in Asia, especially China, South Korea and Japan, while much of the world fleet sails under foreign registries. “Just use foreign ships” is not a serious strategy for a country that relies on its own waterways to move fuel and other essential bulk goods. It is an abdication of one.
Defenders of the Jones Act should also stop pretending nothing has changed since 1920—or even since 1945. The law helped sustain maritime strength in an earlier era, and the merchant marine proved indispensable in World War II. But today’s economy and workforce are different, and modern shipbuilding and shipping depend on automation, specialization and supply chains Congress could not have imagined a century ago. A serious maritime policy should reflect that reality: preserve the law’s national-security core while easing the bottlenecks that have left the system brittle. The direction of reform is not hard to see. Expand the pool of qualified mariners, make reflagging more workable, use trusted allies where prudent, and rebuild shipyard capacity.
A temporary crisis waiver is not proof that the Jones Act should be scrapped. It is proof that America still treats domestic shipping as strategic. This month’s waiver shows not that the law is obsolete, but that Washington has postponed reform for too long. The choice is not between an idealized free market and a perfect Jones Act. It is a choice between treating maritime capacity as essential strategic energy and transportation infrastructure—or pretending ships, shipyards and mariners can be conjured up when the next war or supply shock arrives.
The Jones Act needs reform, not repeal.
Portia Roberts is the Deputy Executive Director of the National Center for Energy Analytics.
