The Trump administration has issued a broad 60-day waiver of the Jones Act in order to ease the cost of transporting fuel and goods between American ports.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says that this action “will allow vital resources like oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and coal to flow freely to U.S. ports for sixty days, and the Administration remains committed to continuing to strengthen our critical supply chains.”
While this is welcome news, it is unlikely that it will have a major impact on oil prices or the cost of goods in the short term.
The Jones Act is a set of laws that reserves domestic maritime trade to vessels that are U.S.-flagged and U.S.-built. As of December 2025, 93 Jones Act-eligible vessels exist. All U.S. oceangoing domestic transport must use one of these 93 vessels.
Because 93 vessels is not a lot of capacity, the U.S. largely moves its 17.6 billion tons of domestic freight by truck (~67% of domestic shipments by weight), pipeline (~20%), and rail (~6%). Less than 4% of domestic freight is transported by water, and of what is transported by water, the majority of that is actually in our inland waterways, in river barges.
Domestic Waterborne Tonnage, 1960 to 2014 (millions of tons)
This has been the status quo for generations; there has never been any significant amount of deadweight tonnage available on Jones Act-eligible ships within living memory. The fact of the matter is that very little is shipped on Jones Act ships in the first place, and our entire system of domestic freight transport has long dismissed coastal shipping routes as viable in the first place.
What are the 93 Jones Act-eligible vessels up to these days? Our November 2025 operational analysis found the following:
The cargo ships move goods from the contiguous United States to Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, and Puerto Rico.
The tankers bring crude oil down from Alaska, and do milk runs delivering refined petroleum products from the gulf coast refineries to domestic markets where demand exceeds pipeline capacity (largely to Florida and the east coast).
Zero ships move any cargo from one part of the contiguous U.S. to any other part.
Since the Jones Act only applies to domestic trade, it doesn’t bring down the cost of importing goods or petroleum products from other nations. The only shipments it will affect are the ones that are moved from one location in the U.S. to another location in the U.S., by water. So the only way that it can affect oil prices is by lowering the cost of transporting petroleum products from domestic refineries to parts of the U.S. that are pipeline constrained, by tanker ship.
In the grand scale of things it likely doesn’t amount to much: a 2023 working paper suggested that this would save less than a dollar per barrel for East Coast gas, jet fuel, and diesel prices.
As for goods, perhaps non-contiguous states and territories might see some impact, but it is unlikely that the waiver will affect shipping costs on the mainland, as no goods are moved by ship here.
So if there isn’t a huge positive impact in the short term, why is it welcome news?
First, the waiver itself is unprecedented in scope. Previous Jones Act waivers have been narrow, reactive, and short; typically 10 to 18 days, covering petroleum products after a hurricane knocks out Gulf Coast refining capacity. Furthermore, increasing restrictions have been placed on the issuance of Jones Act waivers since the 2010s, and a 2021 amendment made it so that most waivers are limited to 10 days extendable to 45 days “with respect to any one set of events”, unless it is a waiver “to address an immediate adverse effect on military operations.”
This waiver is proactive, covers fuel and goods, and lasts 60 days. It indicates a positive and meaningful shift in how the executive branch thinks about the Jones Act, and an intent to challenge waiver restrictions.
Second, it’s opening the door to a bigger conversation. Sixty days is not long enough for the market to actually respond in any meaningful way.
Foreign-flagged vessels can’t rearrange their supply chains in two months, months or years are required for shippers to commit capital to new routes, and shipping corporations are not going to do that for a temporary waiver.
Forty percent of the U.S. population lives along the coasts or the Great Lakes, receiving 67% of their domestic orders via truck. New England can’t access American LNG because no Jones Act-compliant LNG tankers exist, so it imports gas from Trinidad and Tobago instead. The East Coast needs petroleum products but buys almost none of it from Gulf Coast producers, because of the increased costs from Jones Act transportation.
American companies handling physical goods like Amazon, Walmart, Target, Tyson Foods, and Cargill all move none of their goods domestically via ship (except to Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Guam). Neither do any American auto manufacturers. They don’t do this because there are zero cargo vessel services between any two cities in the contiguous United States!1 This is a state of affairs that will not change just because of a 60 day waiver.
The Maritime Administration wants a strong domestic maritime industry to meet the nation’s economic and security needs. The waiver, and the discussion around it, is a good way of opening the discussion as to how best to achieve that.
Unless you count the cargo ships that load up goods at both Long Beach and Oakland before setting sail for Hawaii/Guam.