Reprinted from West Coast Sailors, the Journal of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific
If former president Donald Trump wins in November, the plan called Project 2025 could shape the policy of his administration. Within that sweeping 900-page document, anti-worker and anti-union ideas figure prominently, and the Jones Act is specifically targeted for repeal.
The conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation and at least 140 former Trump administration officials produced the plan. Many observers have noted that, if enacted, it would recast the federal government and fundamentally reshape the nation. Although Trump has publicly backed away from Project 2025, he has no transition team, and when he took office in 2017 about two-thirds of the Heritage Foundation recommendations were adopted.
A Republican wish list with both old and new ideas, the plan would dismantle worker protections for government employees, reduce food stamps, cap funding and coverage of Medicaid, and reduce access to reproductive care, among many other things. It would ban public employee unions, allow states to ban unions, even eliminate certain child labor laws. It would dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and de-prioritize the United States Maritime Administration (MarAd) by shifting to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or the Department of Defense (DoD)It would allow states to ban unions, take away certain overtime protections, and eliminate all public employee unions. For maritime, the document makes repeal of the Jones Act a major feature of its trade policy.
“In his first term as president, Donald Trump was a disaster for workers and our unions, governing exclusively for the wealthy and well-connected,” says AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “A second Trump term would put everything we’ve fought for — good jobs, fair wages, retirement security, worker safety — on the chopping block.”
The Jones Act, which reserves for Americans the nation’s coastal and domestic waterborne trade, is absurdly recast in Project 2025 as a law that benefits foreigners. Calling it an “America last” policy, it dishonestly suggests that the Jones Act makes the U.S. reliant on Russian oil. The law that protects American workers from outrageously cheap foreign competition is duplicitously pitched as hurtful to the American workers it saves. The focus is to mislead shipyard and oil patch workers and serves as guidebook for the anti-union attempt to divide labor.
The document makes the bizarre claim that the Jones Act damages national security because it gives economic incentives, presumably to refiners, to use Russian oil imports. “Jones Act–compliant shipping is so expensive that it is often cheaper for East Coast ports to import oil from Vladimir Putin’s Russia than it is to send it up the coast from Houston or New Orleans.” The economic analysis behind this argument is missing and clearly not the point. A call for repeal of the Jones Act comes soon after in unvarnished language: “Serious consideration should be given to repealing or substantially reforming the Jones Act, which would require legislation.” The authors hedge their bets and reveal the waiver strategy: failing to repeal a wide open waiver process using the emergency “hurricane” standard regularly, is a secondary approach to the same effect.
“The next conservative Administration should unleash American potential by unilaterally enacting Jones Act exemptions wherever allowed, as currently happens most years during hurricane season, and working with Congress to repeal the Jones Act.”
After an unsupported hit on costs, the original Jones Act function as a naval auxiliary in times of war is presented as a detriment to national security. “The Jones Act’s original national security justifications are just as dubious. The act’s goal was to guarantee a sizable fleet of American ships that could be pressed into war service if needed. Aircraft carriers and other post-1920 naval innovations have made this argument obsolete.” The notion that the defense goals of the Jones Act are made obsolete by aircraft carriers betrays a staggering lack of understanding of military operations and supply-chain logistics. It shows the authors to be unaware of the U.S. military’s heavy reliance on Jones Act shipping and the interconnectedness of the maritime and defense industries. They appear oblivious to the basics of defense spending, military sealift and maritime skill shortages.
Throughout the document, maritime policy is shot through with faulty reasoning, mischaracterization of facts, and unsupported conclusions. The authors say an “$800 billion defense budget has plenty of room to maintain a Navy to defend American security interests around the world,” improperly attributing the entire defense appropriation to the Navy and adding that “The U.S. Navy would likely prefer not to use Jones Act ships anyway because they tend to be older and in poorer condition than its own ships or similar foreign-made but domestically owned commercial ships that could also be pressed into service.” The opposite is the case. Generations of generals and admirals have unequivocally stated that the U.S. military depends on the U.S. merchant marine for logistical know-how since at least World War II. Gen. Jacqueline Van Ost, the commanding officer of TRANSCOM, recently stressed the military’s reliance on private and public sector merchant mariners to get project power overseas. Haphazard and speculative, the plan drifts into fantasies about the effective control of flag-of-convenience shipping and its use in military sealift. A sober consideration of the wartime dedication of flags-of-convenience ships, mariners and cargo systems to American interests is not within the scope of the report.
Some of the ideas may reflect a developing military strategy, possibly evident in the APS 3 deployment debate. Project 2025 says the Marine Corps should “divest equipment that is less relevant to distributed low-signature operations in a contested maritime environment that will make funds available for modernization.” Whatever “modernization” might be, it can only be supported according to the document, by cost savings made by equipment divestiture that is not “low-signature.” The reference here to drones and special operations as opposed to prepositioned roll-on/roll-off ships carrying heavy equipment is not lost. Drones good, ships bad, appears to be the distillation of the Policy.
Energy shipping policy is likewise scrambled and incoherent. “The economic costs of the Jones Act … vastly exceed its effect on the supply of domestic ships. For instance, no liquified natural gas (LNG) can be shipped from Alaska to the lower 48 states because there are no U.S.-flagged ships that carry LNG. If there are genuine concerns about U.S. fleet capacity in the absence of the Jones Act, it would be possible to do so through an expansion of the Defense Reserve Fleet.”
It’s unclear here if a bolstered “Defense Reserve Fleet,” presumably the properly called “National Defense Reserve Fleet” and part of the Ready Reserve Force, is contemplated as less of a defense program and more of a commercially viable LNG shipping initiative. Nor is the absence of an Alaskan trade in LNG, either foreign or domestic, demonstrated to be prohibited by Jones Act costs.
Nevertheless, “Serious consideration should be given to repealing or substantially reforming the Jones Act, which would require legislation.”
Trump’s Project 2025 proposes moving MARAD from the Department of Transportation to DoD (or DHS, however, on page 133, Trump’s Agenda calls for disbanding the DHS). When the Coast Guard was moved to DHS in 2003, it was faced with significant budget and priority shortfalls and has become a political hotspot for Congressional focus on an ideological border issue. Moving MARAD to DHS or DOD risks a budget that is deprioritized. More ominously, it might devalue the civilian status of merchant mariners and therefore limit their wartime protections.
The plan proposes an aggressive redefinition of navigable waters that would cede some inland waterways to private ownership, calling into question the Jones Act Applicability.
Rolling back overtime pay is another important anti-labor part of the plan.
The labor section was written by Jonathan Berry, who led the Labor Department’s regulatory office under Trump. During that time, he helped deny guaranteed overtime pay to millions of people and made it harder for workers to hold companies like McDonald’s liable for actions taken by individual stores, allowing companies to hide behind the protections afforded to franchises. Calling for a Republican bill called the Working Families Flexibility Act, the plan would let employers provide comp time instead of time-and-a-half overtime pay. In a similar vein, the plan calls for reinstating a Trump-era rule that made it easier to classify people as independent contractors who lack many of the protections enjoyed by employees. The Economic Policy Institute estimated this would cost workers more than $3 billion per year but the plan calls it “Making Family-Sustaining Work Accessible.”
In political language meant to deceive by concealing or misrepresenting the truth, Project 2025 is an attack on workers. Often cloaked in populist working-class idioms, the plan attempts diminishment at every turn. For those aware of how the Jones Act affects working-class mariners, it’s an obviously delusional smash-and-grab. The goal was to recast the Jones Act as a security breach that makes the U.S. dependent on Russian oil, puts Americans out of work, makes gas more expensive, and benefits the coastal elites while at the same time being a welfare state handout that is above all a defense liability, particularly to the U.S. Navy. Contradictory even on its own terms, and loaded with scattershot inconsistency, Project 2025 is more campaign rally than policy. In presidential politics today, however, little precludes a political platform from becoming policy.
The AFL-CIO has developed an online tool to consider how life would be different for workers under Project 2025 available at: Project 2025 and Unions | It’s Better in a Union https://betterinaunion. org/project-2025