250 Ships in Ten Years: Congress Bets Big on a Maritime Comeback — But the Yards Aren't Ready

It is the most ambitious piece of maritime legislation since Richard Nixon was in the White House, and it arrived with something rare in Washington: genuine bipartisan backing. The SHIPS for America Act, championed by Senators Mark Kelly and Todd Young alongside Representatives Garamendi and Trent Kelly, sets a blunt national target — 250 new US-flagged vessels added to the international fleet within a decade.

The problem is the country that once built liberty ships by the thousand can barely build five commercial vessels a year.

The numbers are stark. Eighty US-flagged ships currently trade internationally. Seventeen of those are sidelined by crew shortages. China, by contrast, operates more than 5,500 and commands nearly half the world's shipbuilding output.

The SHIPS Act's answer is a Strategic Commercial Fleet programme underwritten by a Maritime Security Trust Fund, financed in part by levies on Chinese-built and Chinese-operated vessels calling at American ports. The legislation also proposes a White House Maritime Security Advisor — a post designed to give shipping the same strategic weight as energy or cyber policy.

But sceptics are circling. At the Philadelphia Shipyard, now owned by South Korea's Hanwha Ocean, annual staff turnover approaches 100 percent. The Congressional Budget Office has warned that without resolving the skilled labour crisis, money alone will not deliver hulls. The Cato Institute has gone further, calling the domestic shipbuilding revival a "misplaced obsession."

For the bill's supporters, however, the question is no longer economic efficiency — it is strategic survival. If a conflict in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea disrupted Chinese-linked shipping, America would struggle to supply itself, let alone its allies.

The legislation is moving. Whether the shipyards can follow is the trillion-dollar question.