Americans Get Rare Break From Quietly Expensive Law
The Jones Act, a 1920 law requiring U.S.-built, owned, and crewed vessels for domestic cargo, significantly raises shipping costs compared to foreign-built ships. A temporary waiver granted by the Trump administration in March, recently extended for 90 days, led to a sharp increase in fuel shipments to Puerto Rico, the West Coast, Alaska, and Hawaii. Critics argue the law benefits a small group of shipyards, carriers, and labor unions while imposing higher prices on American consumers.
- ▪The Jones Act mandates that vessels moving cargo between U.S. ports be built in American shipyards, owned by Americans, and at least 75% crewed by U.S. citizens.
- ▪An American-built cargo ship can cost $190 million to $250 million, whereas a comparable foreign-built vessel costs about $30 million.
- ▪During the waiver period, fuel shipments to Puerto Rico and other regions rose to roughly 170% of the recent annual average, according to Cato Institute data.
- ▪Economists estimate that consumers lose more in higher prices than the benefits accrued to shipbuilders and carriers protected by the Jones Act.
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| Original publisher | PJ Media |
| Canonical URL | https://pjmedia.com/veronique-de-rugy/2026/08/13/americans-get-rare-break-from-quietly-expensive-law-n4956122 |
| Publication time | Thu, 13 Aug 2026 22:45:01 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-14T03:24:28.868Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-14T03:24:28.868Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
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| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Americans Get Rare Break From Quietly Expensive Law Veronique de Rugy | 10:45 PM on August 13, 2026 AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty Since March, America has been running an accidental experiment and glimpsing what the country might look like without one of its dumbest statutes. The results are in, and they embarrass a century's worth of U.S. lawmakers and defenders. Advertisement googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display("div-gpt-300x250_3"); //googletag.pubads().refresh([gptAdSlot["div-gpt-300x250_3"]]) }); The statute is the Jones Act, passed in 1920 to rebuild and protect the U.S. merchant marine fleet after World War I disrupted American shipping capabilities.
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