A new executive order is calling on U.S. senior leadership to create a maritime action plan by November, according to a document signed by President Trump on Wednesday.
The maritime executive order is pushing for a government-wide overhaul to the commercial maritime sector to revitalize U.S. shipbuilding as the Trump administration aims to blunt China’s dominance of commercial shipbuilding.
The order assigns a wide-range of tasks to numerous members of Trump’s cabinet – including the heads of the departments of Defense, Commerce, State, Transportation, Homeland Security and Labor, and the U.S. Trade Representative – that will feed into the maritime action plan anchored by the White House’s national security advisor and the chief of the Office of Management and Budget.
Those tasks include a government-wide shipbuilding assessment by the heads of the Defense Department, State Department, Department of Transportation and Department of Homeland Security that will evaluate how the U.S. buys ships. A report that looks at how to grow the number of competitive U.S. shipyards and minimize both program delays and cost overages across the “surface, subsurface, and unmanned” platforms is due to President Donald Trump within 45 days of the EO’s signing, according to the language.
“This report must include separate itemized and prioritized lists of recommendations for the United States Army, Navy, and Coast Guard and shall be included in the MAP,” reads the EO.
While this EO is mostly focused on the commercial shipbuilding sector, the White House is expected to issue additional maritime executive orders, USNI News understands. It’s unclear what future EOs may look like.
“I think the goal is not to supplant China by any means, but to start growing the American aspect,” Sal Mercogliano, a former U.S. Military Sealift Command mariner and a current history professor at Campbell University, told USNI News of this week’s executive order.
“And what I get from this is this doesn’t do anything today, in regards to U.S. shipbuilding besides give everybody in the industry a nice warm fuzzy feeling. I think what this does is set in motion what could be a plan – that maritime action plan that’s formulated in 210 days or 209 days now – that may start the process to start reversing the downward trend.”
According to order data from BRS Shipbrokers, China has grown its orders from 1,216 in 2020 to 3,419 in 2024 — more than half of the total global orders.
Trump signed the EO at the White House on Wednesday, just over a month after he announced the creation of a new shipbuilding office nestled within the National Security Council.
Mercogliano noted the scope of the EO, which is calling for input from multiple government agencies, and other efforts like the Shipbuilding and Harbor Infrastructure for Prosperity and Security for America Act legislation working its way through Congress and the U.S. Trade Representative’s section 301 investigation into China’s shipbuilding and maritime practices.
“There’s a lot of coordination across departments here,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of effort here to wrangle all of this.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who recently visited the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, recorded a video about the EO outside of the White House and posted it to X on Wednesday evening.
“The problem is their academy is dilapidated,” Duffy said of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy located in Kings Point, New York. “We’ve got to upgrade the academy, make sure we have more mariners. We’re going to build more ships.”
Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of lawmakers pushing for the SHIPS Act – which also seeks to overhaul the commercial maritime sector and includes provisions on mariner workforce development – praised the EO for its view of the shipbuilding threats posed by China.
“We will reintroduce the SHIPS for America Act with renewed support in the coming weeks to provide the Congressional authorizations needed to truly revitalize the American shipbuilding and maritime industries, and work with the administration to get it passed,” reads a Wednesday statement from Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), and Rep. Trent Kelly (R-Miss.).
“That’s how we’ll put Americans to work building more oceangoing ships and flying the American flag on merchant vessels to reclaim America’s global maritime leadership.”
White House National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was an original drafter of the bill and announced the first iteration of the legislation in the fall with Senator Kelly.
Mercogliano said he expects Congress to codify much of this EO into law using the SHIPS Act.
“It seems to me that the natural transition here is going to be [to] develop this maritime action plan,” Mercogliano told USNI News. “Under the SHIPS Act, you appoint this maritime security advisor, whoever that is. And then you use the funds that are going to be in that maritime security trust fund to fund part of this.”
“They want this to generate its own revenue,” he added.
Much of the EO includes language featured in a draft obtained by USNI News in early March. Like previous iterations, this week’s EO calls for the Department of Homeland Security to enforce the Harbor Maintenance Tax on foreign cargo and for the Elon Musk-guided Department of Government Efficiency to assess acquisition processes for both the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security and then provide Trump a blueprint to utilize better procurement methods.
One addition to the signed EO is a provision calling for more U.S.-flagged ships participating in international trade. That section directs the Defense Secretary and Transportation Secretary to submit legislative proposals to OMB and Waltz that will ultimately go into the maritime action plan. Those proposals must “ensure that adequate cubed footage and gross tonnage of United States-flagged commercial vessels can be called upon in times of crisis, while limiting the likelihood of Government waste,” according to the EO.
Mercogliano said that section of the order lacked specifics and noted the U.S. can quickly reflag vessels to meet the requirement.
“It’s doing two different things. It’s a shipbuilding EO, but it’s talking about increasing the size of the fleet,” he said. “And that’s two separate [things]. You can bring in Korean and Japanese-built ships because they just can’t trade in the coastal trade. But they can be sent into the international fleet. If you look at the ships in the maritime security program, the tanker security program, almost all of them are foreign-built.”
Another section of the EO seeks to reconcile the differences between how the military and civilian maritime sectors count time at sea. While there have been delays for merchant mariners in licensing and credentialing, Mercogliano said the U.S. needs to make the civilian system more accessible to members of the military.
Notably absent from the April 9 EO is the Shipyard Accountability and Workforce Support proposal, also known as SAWS, a U.S. Navy plan that’s trying to address the rising cost of submarines. That plan has support from the two largest military shipbuilders that construct submarines – HII’s Newport News and General Dynamics Electric Boat.
“I applaud President Trump for taking a comprehensive approach to revitalize the shipbuilding industrial base,” Chris Kastner, the president and chief executive officer of HII, said in a statement about the EO. “This order is a bold step in the right direction, to expand capacity in shipbuilding and workforce development, ultimately in order to meet the urgent, increased demand for ships for the Navy and the nation.”
A previous draft of the EO included language that mirrored the SAWS proposal, USNI News reported last month.
