The US is proposing fees on cargo carried into the US by foreign-built vessels, an effort to boost the US shipbuilding industry that could substantially increase costs for US importers.
The administration's America's Maritime Action Plan released late last week proposes fees of between 1-25¢/kilogram (kg), or effectively $10-$250/tonne (t), for all cargo imported into the US by non-US built vessels, which make up the vast majority of the global fleet across all commodity segments.
The plan does not specify cargo types and describes the fee as "universal". This could mean shipments of Venezuelan crude loaded onto an Aframax tanker into the US Gulf coast carried on a foreign-built vessel could incur a fee between $700,000 lumpsum at $10/t or $17.5mn at $250/t.
The freight rate for an Aframax tanker on a Caribbean-US Gulf coast voyage was at $32.57/t on 16 February, or $2,279,900 lumpsum. The proposed fee could be as much as 30pc of the total freight cost at the low end or increase the freight cost by nearly eight times at the high end.
The proposed fees could be used to build a proposed Maritime Security Trust Fund to support "programs identified as helpful for the promotion, growth and strengthening of the domestic maritime sector", according to the plan. The fund is part of a broader plan the administration of President Donald Trump launched last year to support shipbuilding in the US.
The US and China reached an agreement in November 2025 to pause new shipping fees which ended a months-long series of proposed, and shortly implemented, retaliatory shipping fees between the two countries. The pause was for at least one year, making additional shipping fees into the US before November 2026 unlikely.
The plan released last week does not include any specific timelines for implementing fees.
Autonomous vessels on tap
The 37-page action plan also said the US needs to develop systems and regulations for non-human-staffed ships to navigate existing waterways.
"To ease testing for industry, the US Coast Guard should establish one or more areas within the exclusive economic zone of the US, to include the Great Lakes region, that would allow for the safe and expedited testing of commercial robotic and autonomous maritime technologies," the plan says.
The testing would help the US Navy develop emerging technologies to field affordable weapon platforms, like remotely operated or fully automated submarines and small vessels, to balance high-cost assets like aircraft carriers in battle. But the action plan also lays out plans that suggest the administration is preparing for fully automated commercial shipping.
Automated shipping lacks the regulatory framework to account for the absence of a human crew, especially for emergencies like spills. Insurers also have no framework for how to decide who is responsible for a collision with an unmanned vessel, among a host of other issues, according to the action plan.
Pilots, who climb onto ships outside of ports in sometimes dangerous conditions to physically guide the vessel to its terminal, seem the most likely industry to be first affected by autonomous navigation systems like those proposed in the action plan.
There is a need to develop "redundant sensor systems to guarantee safe navigation in complex environments like ports", the plan said, language likely referring to tasks now handled by human pilots. The plan also calls for the development and certification of control centers for remote operators, as well as "ensuring safe workloads when operators may supervise multiple vessels from shore".
