26. Trade · Major · Needs Congress · Contested — excluded from counts
Repeal the Jones Act
Printed page 801 26. Trade · from “The Case for Free Trade”
“Repeal the Jones Act, a century-old “Buy American” maritime law that has decimated the U.S. shipbuilding industry.”
What has happened
- Not started
The Jones Act is intact and both branches moved to reinforce it. No repeal bill appears in the 119th-Congress Corpus, and none of the 104 public laws touches the Act; the Maritime Administration continued to run the machinery it creates (Jones Act vessel-availability determinations, U.S.-citizenship documentation for vessel owners). Executive Order 14269, "Restoring America's Maritime Dominance" (2025-04-09), ordered a Maritime Action Plan to make "United States-flagged and built vessels commercially competitive", and USTR's Section 301 action on China's maritime, logistics and shipbuilding sectors imposed fees on Chinese-built vessels calling at U.S. ports. The bills before Congress — the SHIPS for America Act, Building Ships in America Act, American Cargo for American Ships Act — expand U.S.-build and U.S.-flag requirements rather than repeal them.
No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- Contested Recommendation from “The Case for Free Trade”.
- Negative search: Federal Register full-text
conditions[term]="Jones Act"since 2025-01-20 returns two documents, neither a repeal — a MARAD information-collection renewal for “Jones Act Vessel Availability Determinations” (2025-03-24) and an FCC submarine-cable proposed rule (2025-10-27).conditions[term]="Merchant Marine Act"returns eleven documents, all routine administration (uniform financial reporting, capital construction fund, U.S. citizenship requirements at 46 CFR 355/356). Bill titles in the Corpus matching “Jones Act” / “cabotage”: none. - Contrary action, Primary sources loaded this session:
- Executive Order 14269, “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance”, 2025-04-09 — https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/04/15/2025-06465/restoring-americas-maritime-dominance (§1 read at govinfo, FR-2025-04-15/2025-06465). The order does not name the Jones Act; it is cited here for direction of travel, not as evidence about the Act itself.
- USTR, “Notice of Action and Proposed Action in Section 301 Investigation of China’s Targeting the Maritime, Logistics, and Shipbuilding Sectors for Dominance”, 2025-04-23 — https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/04/23/2025-06927/notice-of-action-and-proposed-action-in-section-301-investigation-of-chinas-targeting-the-maritime and the modification of 2025-11-13 — https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/11/13/2025-19873/notice-of-modification-of-section-301-action-chinas-targeting-of-the-maritime-logistics-and
- Pending bills that strengthen the regime: S. 1541 / H.R. 3151 SHIPS for America Act of
2025, S. 1536 Building Ships in America Act of 2025, H.R. 2035 American Cargo for
American Ships Act (passed the House, received in the Senate 2025-06-10) — all in the
billsCorpus. - Presidential Memorandum, “Rebuilding the United States Navy and America’s Shipbuilding
Industrial Base”, 2026-08-13 —
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/rebuilding-the-united-states-navy-and-americas-shipbuilding-industrial-base/
(in the
presidential-actionsCorpus; listed as a lead, not opened in full).
- Action
- repeal
- Object
- Jones Act (Merchant Marine Act of 1920)
- ID
- 2101