President Trump has extended the Jones Act waiver for another 90 days, a White House official said on Friday — keeping foreign-flagged ships free to haul oil, fuel and fertilizer between American ports, in the administration's running fight against the energy prices the Iran war pushed up. The extension takes effect at 12 a.m. on November 16, two days before the current waiver expired, so there is no gap. It is already the longest waiver in the history of the century-old shipping law.
The Jones Act normally requires cargo moving between U.S. ports to travel on ships built in America, owned by American companies and crewed by American workers. The administration issued a blanket waiver in March, a month after the United States launched the war on Iran, to break transport bottlenecks and bring fuel costs down. The loads covered include gasoline, jet fuel, crude oil, naphtha, liquefied natural gas, soy oil and fertilizers — and the waiver keeps a safeguard: each voyage still faces a case-by-case review that checks whether a U.S.-flagged vessel is available first.
The White House says the policy is working in plain numbers: since March, an additional 90 million barrels of petroleum have moved between U.S. ports under the waiver, most of it refined products — including 27 million barrels of gasoline, 26 million barrels of crude oil and 6 million barrels of renewable fuels. More ships able to carry fuel to where it is needed means fewer local shortages and less pressure on prices at the pump and the diesel dock.
For American families and farmers, that is the point of the extension: gasoline and diesel prices that feed into everything from the commute to grocery shelves, and fertilizer prices that decide what next season's food costs to grow. The waiver does not repeal the Jones Act — the American-ship rule comes back in full when the waiver lapses, and U.S. vessels keep first call on every voyage in the meantime. What the President has decided is that while a war is driving energy costs, American consumers come first for another 90 days.
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