Trump’s New Executive Order Leaves Mariner Crisis Unresolved: What’s Next?

by Captain John Konrad (gCaptain) This week President Trump signed a huge deal with French shipping giant CMA to build approximately 20 new U.S.-flagged ships and announced at the State of the Union address that the White House will soon open a new shipbuilding office.

The CMA deal is fantastic news for the US Merchant Marine, but where will we find the mariners? The United States is already facing a dire US Merchant Mariner shortage that has forced the Navy’s sealift fleet to scale back operations. Military Sealift Command plans to sideline as many as 19 naval support ships simply because there aren’t enough qualified Americans to crew them.

This slow-motion disaster is not just a labor issue—it’s a full-blown national security crisis. Will the new comprehensive executive order leaked from the National Security Council’s maritime department fix the problem? No, and its aggressive focus on shipbuilding and signing deals to expand the fleet could deepen the crisis.

How did we get here? A perfect storm of failed maritime policy, bureaucratic inertia, and regulatory overreach over the past decade has hollowed out our merchant marine, leaving warships without crews and supply lines in peril.

MARAD, Coast Guard and DOT: Years of Failure to Address the Workforce Crisis

It’s not as if warnings were lacking – they were simply ignored. Back in 2018, then-Maritime Administrator Mark Buzby under Trump 1.0  sounded the alarm before Congress, reporting a deficit of nearly 1,800 merchant mariners needed to crew a sustained sealift operation.