On the eve of President’s Day weekend, the Trump administration released its long-awaited Maritime Action Plan (MAP), billed as a sweeping blueprint for reversing decades of US maritime decline. One of its core goals: resuscitating a commercial shipbuilding industry that has fallen into a near-total collapse.
To that end, the plan calls for a broad mix of subsidies, new fees, and mandates designed to coerce demand toward US shipyards.
Such logic is neither new nor uncontested. In a recent essay published by the Center for International Maritime Security, I examined similarly motivated legislative proposals now circulating in Washington and argued that they would impose substantial costs while failing to address the maritime challenges that actually matter. Many of those critiques apply equally to the MAP.
A Chasm of Competitiveness
The MAP declares that its objective is not merely to increase the number of ships built in the United States but to reconstitute an industrial base capable of “competitive international performance.” It further emphasizes the importance of constructing large, oceangoing commercial ships—the workhorses of global trade—rather than small craft or niche vessels.
It’s a vision sharply at odds with economic reality.
US shipyards charge roughly five times prevailing global prices for large commercial ships. As a result, few are built. Only three large oceangoing cargo ships have been delivered by US yards so far this decade (all for the protected domestic market where foreign-built vessels are prohibited by the Jones Act). Closing the chasm of competitiveness with leading international shipyards to spark domestic production would require not incremental improvement but a transformation of costs, productivity, and industrial organization on a scale not seen in modern US shipbuilding history.
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