The Port Fee Disruption

Trump administration is stepping back a bit on the Global Jones Act (not its real name), the plan to punish shipping lines for buying Chinese vessels:

The Trump administration’s new plan is to base the fees largely on vessel capacity, resulting in lower fees for smaller ships coming into ports such as Los Angeles, New York, Savannah, Ga., and Oakland, Calif., the people said. The U.S. Trade Representative’s office is also looking to ease the charges on ships carrying agricultural exports such as soybeans and timber, the people said.

Reuters earlier reported on the USTR’s revised port-fee plan.

The USTR’s original plan, announced in February, was to charge Chinese-built vessels between $500,000 and $1.5 million for each port call. Shipping companies and trade groups warned that the fees would result in higher costs for American consumers, hurt U.S. farm exports and threaten dockworker jobs. Container operators said they would cut their calls to U.S. ports by half. A typical sailing from Asia involves an average four U.S. port calls.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on Tuesday told the Senate Finance Committee that the administration was making revisions to the plan based on public feedback.

Again, it’s a plan that’s egregiously disruptive to global trade, egregiously disruptive to US employment, and based on the idea that it’s worth cutting off one of our fingers if we can cut two fingers off of China. As with tariffs, it’s worth asking about implementation; in the post-DOGE world where is the financial and legal bureaucracy that’s going to make this work?

Photo credit: By kees torn – MAERSK MC KINNEY MÖLLER & MARSEILLE MAERSK, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82090447