Posted on February 5, 2025
For America’s waterfront, the Trump administration remains a mystery. As a campaigner, President Donald Trump’s political signaling thrilled maritime industry stakeholders, and, as the administration gets underway, an exuberant maritime sector expects good things. But it won’t be easy or entirely fun.
Even though the new administration’s National Security Advisor, former Congressman Michael Waltz, was a primary driver of the SHIPS for America Act, the administration will be tempted to prioritize painless performative fluff over the hard work of getting America’s maritime industry back on track.
Put another way, it was far easier to fire Adm. Linda Fagan, the Coast Guard’s first female Commandant — which Trump did on day one — than it will be to really fix America’s troubled and chronically underfunded Coast Guard.
Painful tradeoffs are looming. Take the coastal wind farm industry, once envisioned as a big driver of maritime employment. President Trump’s first executive orders halted new offshore wind leases in federal waters and put existing leases under review. The entire sector, which was expected to bring some 77,000 workers into the maritime sector by 2030, is in disarray.
Of course, simultaneous reinvigoration of the offshore drilling industry — a Trump administration priority — can offset wind farm losses. But any sustained conversion of lost offshore wind jobs into the boom-bust offshore drilling industrial base will only come with a solid increase in the price of oil. That didn’t happen in the first Trump administration. Between January 2017 and January 2021, the price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil only broached the $70-a-barrel price point a few times.
This time, increased oil prices, potentially coming in conjunction with a Canadian trade war, are likely to cause pain elsewhere in the maritime economy.
The threat of global trade warfare offers another set of risks for the American maritime industry. Tariff-driven disruption of cargo traffic, without compensatory efforts at using tariff exemptions to jump-start cargo ship production in the U.S., may put America’s waterfront under real strain.
Challenges at global commercial chokepoints may also stress America’s maritime. A no-holds-barred trade war with Canada may disrupt the flow of U.S. cargo through the St. Lawrence Seaway. The Seaway is an economic lifeline for the American Midwest, driving some $50 billion in economic activity and sustaining 356,858 jobs in both countries.
To the south, traffic through the Panama Canal is at risk. President Trump has repeatedly announced his interest in reassuming control of the Panama Canal. If Panama fights back or sabotages the canal itself, the damage could disrupt some 6% of global trade and create real headaches for American security planners.
On the shipbuilding side, President Trump has repeatedly expressed interest in growing the Navy, but he hasn’t done a lot to push the Navy to produce.
Trump has made his concerns about programmatic delays clear, but he has no record of killing troubled shipbuilding programs. While he regularly criticized the Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier program, he did little to constrain the program. In the 2024 campaign, Trump both celebrated and criticized the behind-schedule and over-budget Constellation-class frigates.
So, this leads to the question of how the industry can do well during the Trump administration. There’s no easy answer other than to buckle up, be ready to exploit transient opportunities, and make it easy for the Trump administration to sweep in and champion your business.
