Emergency suspensions of the century-old Jones Act have now been in place for months at a time, but American drivers would hardly notice if they vanished. That’s the core of an argument laid out by Robert Pipken in American Thinker, who contends that the waivers issued by the Department of Homeland Security have produced savings of less than a penny per gallon while quietly tilting the domestic shipping market toward foreign operators.
Pipken, a former communications director and legislative director on Capitol Hill and onetime media relations director at Boston Consulting Group, takes aim at the policy as its current slate of waivers approaches a November expiration. The timing matters: with midterm elections looming, he warns that DHS may be tempted to keep the arrangements in place for political appearances rather than let them die.
What the waivers actually do
The Merchant Marine Act of 1920 requires that vessels moving cargo between two U.S. ports be built in America, owned by American citizens or entities, and crewed by American mariners. It is not a cheap standard to meet. Domestic carriers invest heavily to comply, pay U.S. corporate taxes, follow Coast Guard environmental rules, and provide wages and workplace protections mandated by federal labor law.
When DHS waives those requirements, Pipken argues, the result isn’t a freer market — it’s a preferential one. Foreign-flagged vessels, which he says have accounted for roughly 95 percent of waiver voyages during the current crisis, get access to domestic waters without carrying any of the costs that American operators bear. They pay no U.S. corporate tax, register under flags in tax havens, and staff their ships with international crews not subject to American minimum wage or workplace safety rules. In effect, Pipken writes, the government has subsidized foreign fleets with a competitive advantage that domestic industry cannot match.
The push for waivers, in his telling, comes mainly from multinational energy conglomerates and some libertarian think tanks. Their pitch has been consistent: suspending the law would untangle supply chains, invite global competition, and bring down gasoline prices fast. But the record so far doesn’t match the sales job. Despite multi-month suspensions, retail gas prices have stayed stubbornly high, and independent industry assessments have found consumer savings below one cent per gallon.
A double standard dressed up as competition
Defenders of the Jones Act are routinely accused of protecting domestic maritime unions from global competition. Pipken pushes back on that framing: genuine competition, he argues, requires a level field, and the waiver regime delivers anything but. The exemptions let foreign operators profit from American commerce while remaining outside what he calls the American social contract — exempt from the taxes, environmental standards, and labor protections that define it.
The deeper concern he raises is strategic. Hollowing out domestic maritime capacity, he writes, invites exactly the supply chain vulnerabilities that policymakers claim to be solving. For a global superpower, dismantling the industries that secure its own borders and logistics amounts to self-sabotage. A nation that can’t build, flag, or crew its own commercial vessels, he argues, cedes control of its own destiny and becomes structurally dependent on foreign actors in a crisis — precisely when that dependency is most dangerous.
There is also a physical risk in the mix. Allowing unvetted foreign tankers to navigate inland waterways, Pipken writes, puts environmental and infrastructure safety on the line in exchange for what he describes as a corporate windfall marketed as consumer advocacy.
The November decision
Pipken’s conclusion is blunt: the waiver regime has run its course, and its beneficiaries are now clear. He urges DHS to let the temporary waivers expire permanently rather than extend them for election-season optics. American laws, American taxes, and American workers, he writes, are not obstacles to be routed around — they are the foundation of national security.
Whether the department agrees will become clear as the November deadline approaches. What the past several months have shown, according to this critique, is that the promised relief at the pump never materialized — and that the cost of chasing it has been borne by the domestic operators the law was written to sustain.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/maritime-sovereignty-worth-more-than-a-penny-at-the-pump/