This story has been updated to correct the background of a member of the White House’s new shipbuilding office.
The Trump administration wants a sweeping government-wide overhaul of the U.S. commercial and military maritime sectors in an effort to catch up to China’s unrivaled shipbuilding capacity, according to draft documents obtained by USNI News.
The draft of an executive order, dated Feb. 27, calls on administration officials to create a maritime action plan over the next six months to revamp the American maritime industry.
“The United States has always been a maritime nation, but today China’s shipbuilding sector has established a position of dominance in the global market through unfair non-market practices, creating over 200 times the capacity of the U.S. shipbuilding industry,” reads a draft White House fact sheet accompanying the draft order.
The order will create a new maritime industrial base office within the White House’s National Security Council to lead the effort. Trump announced the new office on Tuesday night during a joint address to Congress.
“To boost our defense industrial base, we are also going to resurrect the American shipbuilding industry, including commercial shipbuilding and military shipbuilding. And for that purpose, I am announcing tonight that we will create a new office of shipbuilding in the White House and offer special tax incentives to bring this industry home to America, where it belongs,” Trump said.
“We used to make so many ships. We don’t make them anymore very much, but we’re going to make them very fast, very soon. It will have a huge impact.”
Multiple cabinet secretaries – including the U.S. Trade Representative and the heads of the departments of Defense, Commerce, State, Transportation, and Homeland Security – have six months from when the EO is signed to provide Trump with the maritime action plan, according to the draft.
Key figures running the effort include Ian Bennitt, a former Capitol Hill staffer who is currently serving as a special assistant to the president and the senior director of maritime and industrial capacity, and Cameron Humphrey, another former Hill aide who is now the director of maritime and industrial capacity, according to their LinkedIn accounts.
The maritime action plan must include a wide range of items, including a probe into China’s “unfair targeting of maritime logistics, and shipbuilding sectors,” the creation of a maritime security trust fund that could put money toward a shipbuilding financial incentives program for the next nine years and the creation of maritime opportunity zones to promote shipbuilding investment.
“As the leading economic and geopolitical power in the world, the United States needs a flexible funding source – akin to but distinct from a sovereign wealth fund – that is capable of underwriting our affirmative vision,” reads a section in the EO about the trust fund. The proposal wants to use tariff and tax money to build up the fund.
The plan also calls on the Department of Homeland Security to impose the Harbor Maintenance Tax on foreign cargo and certify that carriers offloading foreign cargo in Mexico or Canada pay the relevant charges and another 10 percent fee, according to the executive order language.
“The Secretary of Homeland Security shall take immediate action to require all foreign origin cargo to clear the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) process at a U.S. port of entry for security and collection of all applicable customs, taxes, tariffs, fees, interest, and other charges,” reads the draft EO.
The maritime action plan should also include a proposal to revamp the acquisition process, according to the draft. The Department of Government Efficiency, the new agency also known as DOGE that is guided by billionaire Elon Musk, must start a review within three months of Trump signing the executive order. DOGE will assess acquisition processes for both departments of Defense and Homeland Security and give the president a blueprint for better procurement methods. DOGE must evaluate “specifically unaccountable Navy requirement officers,” according to the fact sheet.
The order also includes language similar to the Shipyard Accountability and Workforce Support proposal, also known as SAWS, a Navy-crafted plan seeking to tackle the rising cost of submarines. Specifically, the White House document calls for the Navy to “increase wages for nuclear shipyard workers through innovative contract changes using existing funds.”
That language mirrors the SAWS proposal the Navy put forward last year. The Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget rejected SAWS. Meanwhile, Congress – criticizing the Navy’s lack of transparency about the proposal in the joint explanatory statement language accompanying the Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act – shelved SAWS.
Under SAWS, the Navy could pull money forward for boats not yet under contract, allowing submarine builders General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding to increase wages for those working in the shipyard. The sea service could also attach the wages for trades like pipefitters and welders to each hull, while creating a separate funding pool for employees like crane operators and supervisors working throughout the yard.
HII and General Dynamics spokesmen declined to comment on the draft report when contacted by USNI News on Wednesday.
The executive order would kick off a new 45-day shipbuilding review to assess delays and increased costs for submarine, unmanned systems and surface ship programs. The call for that review comes nearly a year after former Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro unveiled the results of his own 45-day shipbuilding review that concluded most of the Navy’s major shipbuilding programs are running behind schedule.
There are multiple factors at play in the proposal, including foreign influence, domestic shipbuilding, U.S. operations and port activities, according to Sal Mercogliano, a former U.S. Military Sealift Command mariner and a current history professor at Campbell University.
“What we’re seeing right now is a flurry of legislation and executive orders and tariffs that are impacting shipping,” Mercogliano told USNI News.
“Some are having an immediate effect, some are going to have a short to a medium-term impact. And right now, [what] everybody in the shipping industry is trying to do is gauge that impact. And so it’s creating a lot of … doubt in what this market is going to look like,” he continued. “Now that’s no different than it’s been for four years with everything from the supply chain in COVID to the Houthis. So this is just a new element that is kind of thrown into it, but for U.S. operators this is a moment of opportunity.”
Mercogliano said this is the most attention shipping has received in 50 years, when then-President Richard Nixon signed the Merchant Marine Act of 1970 so the government could provide loans to commercial shipbuilders and operators to incentivize them to rebuild the U.S. Merchant Marine.
