Posted on December 7, 2025
At this year’s International WorkBoat Show, leaders from across the U.S. dredging industry described a market caught between long-term demand and short-term political and regulatory headwinds.
Great Lakes Dredge & Dock senior vice president David Johanson opened with a comparison to last year’s “surge of work.”
“If you were here last year, I talked about surge of work, which was factual,” Johanson said. “That market ended up being like $2.8 billion. This year…It’s going to be about $1.7 billion.” He noted that the market has since leveled off. “It doesn’t help when there’s no President’s budget. It doesn’t help when there’s a government shutdown. It doesn’t help when there’s two years of running continuing resolutions.”
Despite the drop, Johanson said the issue is not a lack of dredging equipment, which he categorized into mechanical/bucket dredges, hydraulic/pipeline dredges and hopper dredges.
For contractors, continuing resolutions, shutdown threats, and partisan fights in Washington are now a routine drag on project delivery.
Curtin Maritime CEO Martin Curtin, whose company works strictly in the mechanical space, said those conditions are showing up as schedule slippage. He tied those delays directly to environmental reviews and permitting.
“The environmental pushes, you know, the EIRs, the paperwork that goes through, the permitting process, and everyone kind of being at odds with each other constantly.
“Us being a California-based company, we see that in California all the time. We were new to these other markets in the Gulf and the East Coast, but we’re starting to see it like California-style permitting politics internally in these other states that we didn’t see.”
Even so, Curtin said the underlying stakes mean dredging will remain essential.
“We’re an import economy,” he said. “We don’t make things in the United States nearly as much. So you shut the ports down and the whole country shuts down very quickly…I don’t think long-term it has any serious effects because of the way that our country is built and our port systems and the way that it all works. But in the short term, it definitely is a huge pain in the ass.”
Dredging Contractors of America CEO Bill Doyle walked through recent developments on the Senate Energy and Water Subcommittee’s FY26 proposal, and how it connects to the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund.
“You heard Dave say that 70% of the federal industry…runs through the Army Corps of Engineers. That is correct,” Doyle said.
He continued, “Some breaking news that happened this week, I think it was Monday, is that the Senate Energy and Water Committee came out with their FY26 budget. And it’s in the tune of $3.1 billion dollars by FY26…So, if your goods coming into the United States is $1,000, and that’s the value of that, then $1.25, $1.25, goes into the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund. That fund, then, is drawn on to do maintenance dredging, contracting to the Army Corps of Engineers. And historically, it wasn’t always used for that. So, the calculation is that there is $11 million of unspent, out-of-maintenance funding, quote-unquote, supposed to be available…The Senate said, okay, we’re going to go for the regular $2 million. But we’re also going to ask, well, we’re going to legislate an additional $1 million from that $11 million surplus.”
He cautioned that the process is just beginning.
“So, we’ll see what happens. Obviously, it’s got to go through the House. There’s a million different things that happen in D.C.,” said Doyle. “It is what it is.”
Johanson was blunt about what the backlog looks like on the ground.
“Okay, $11 million. That’s a lot of money. It’s shameful the condition of the U.S. Coastal Waterway. It’s shameful that courts aren’t able to maintain maximum navigational data back to Capitol Road,” said Johanson. “It’s almost criminal that you would take this money from us. We pay for taxes on all these goods and services and not spend it for its intention.”
Johanson noted that coastal restoration projects are piling up in the queue.
“Two years ago there were 16 projects that were pushed into 2026. Many of those, they get funded from a different budget, not from the Corps’ main dredging project. Now there’s actually 30 in backlog…Then what happens is there will be a surge of projects come out, and then the media will say there’s not enough dredges. But if you had released 16 and turned it into 30, what’s it going to be next year? Is it going to be 45?”
Looking ahead to WRDA 2026, Doyle said one of DCA’s top legislative priorities is revising old environmental restrictions on the East coast.
“One of the biggest constraints that we have in dredging… let’s just take it from Virginia, North Carolina, all the way down to Florida…if you take a look at Savannah, Georgia, Brunswick, you take Charleston, South Carolina, those are all ports that are…increasing in volume and traffic… With that comes dredging. In some of those ports, in some of those areas, we’re only allowed to dredge four to six months per year,” Doyle said.
“It’s based on environmental windows that were put in place over 50 years ago…based on what we would say is wrong science, or no science, or science fiction.”
He cited more recent federal work showing that year-round dredging is feasible.
“As a matter of fact, in 2020… the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Marine Fisheries all agreed that the science supported dredging 24-7, 365. And it actually brings in implementation. That we were allowed to dredge around the clock. And then what even happens? You get some NGO comes in, files suit, goes to court, and everything stops. So how do you get around that?”
Johanson said Great Lakes has been working directly with ERDC to test new approaches and update long-standing assumptions.
“Additionally, with regard to environmental windows, my company, Great Lakes, has taken on some work with ERBIC, Engineering Research Development Center for Corps of Engineers, where we’re trialing some new technology,” Johanson said. “There’s this junk science that they set environmental restrictions on, and what it does is it strains, mainly the hop and dredge fleet on these projects that Bill was talking about. It strains them, and it drives up the price. It doesn’t protect anything,” Johanson said.
