Colin Grabow
As speculation swirls around the future of the Jones Act waiver and whether it will be renewed, pro-Jones Act groups are stepping up their attacks on the law’s suspension. This week, the Transportation Institute (TI), a pro-Jones Act advocacy organization recently caught using misleading numbers in another anti-waiver attack, argued that foreign vessels operating under the waiver pose a threat to American infrastructure.
To justify the claim, TI produced a graphic showing that approximately 53 percent of movements under the waiver between March 17 and July 15 involved a ship found to have a deficiency under Port State Control (PSC), the inspection regime by which countries check visiting foreign vessels. Standing alone, that sounds alarming. But if there’s a “gotcha” here, it works in the other direction.
Applying TI’s own Yardstick to the Jones Act Fleet
Missing from TI’s analysis is a baseline or comparison. The question isn’t whether some waiver vessels have deficiencies—inevitably, some will—but how they perform compared to the US domestic fleet.
Using the Coast Guard’s Port State Information Exchange database, I compiled inspection records for every vessel on MARAD’s list of Jones Act–eligible ships. According to its data, the deficiency rate among inspected Jones Act vessels since January 1, 2024 (the start of TI’s data window) is 57.5 percent. That’s higher than the 52.6 percent TI is citing as evidence that the waiver fleet is dangerous.
But TI’s Number is Flawed
The comparison is admittedly imperfect. The waiver fleet consists overwhelmingly of tankers and some dry bulk carriers (none of which are in the Jones Act’s oceangoing fleet), while the Jones Act figure includes containerships, general cargo ships, and other vessel types. Vessel type matters here: restricting the Jones Act fleet to tankers alone reduces its deficiency rate from 57.5 percent to 46.0 percent, showing that mixing vessel types can meaningfully distort comparisons.
Furthermore, Port State Control is administered by countries around the world, which may apply varying degrees of scrutiny. Jones Act ships, meanwhile, largely operate in US waters and are overwhelmingly inspected by the US Coast Guard alone.
For a more apples-to-apples comparison, I restricted the analysis to tankers and inspections conducted by the Coast Guard during the same time period (January 1, 2024, through July 15, 2026), an approach that covers 50 of 56 Jones Act tankers (89 percent) and 134 of 144 waiver tankers (93 percent). And the picture changes considerably:
On the cleanest comparison the data allow, with the same inspector, the same vessel type, and the same time window, the Jones Act tanker fleet has a meaningfully worse deficiency record than the waiver fleet. The effect isn’t marginal. The domestic fleet not only has a higher deficiency rate but also a notably higher number of deficiencies.
What this Does and Doesn’t Show
To be clear, this isn’t a claim that the waiver fleet is “safer” in some general sense or that Jones Act tankers are unsafe. PSC deficiency counts are imperfect proxies for risk, sample sizes among both fleets are modest, and deficiencies can range from a fire door improperly propped open with a hold-back hook (Clearocean Fuku) to missing lock-out valves on a fire-suppression system (American Energy), the two vessels already cited above as each fleet’s highest-deficiency ship.
What it does show is that TI’s specific claim that the waiver fleet’s PSC record demonstrates a unique threat to American infrastructure doesn’t hold up once both the Jones Act and waiver fleets are given equal treatment. If PSC deficiency rates are the metric TI believes policymakers should use, applying that metric consistently leads to the opposite conclusion from the one the group is advancing.
Full data, sourcing, and methodology — including itemized Coast Guard deficiency records for every vessel — are available here: Waiver tanker fleet report | Jones Act tanker fleet report
