Jones Act Protectors Spent Millions While Puerto Rico Paid the Price

Maritime corporations and unions have poured documented millions into congressional coffers and lobbying filings to preserve a 1920 shipping law that economists say costs U.S. territories hundreds...

The single most documented fact in the Jones Act money trail is this: In 2018 alone, the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association spent a record $837,000 lobbying Congress — with 'Supporting the Jones Act' listed as the explicit purpose on its LD-2 filings, according to OpenSecrets. That same year, Louisiana shipyard operator Edison Chouest Offshore contributed $72,400 to Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), whose Gulf Coast constituents operate the Jones Act-compliant offshore support vessels that dominate the domestic energy supply chain. Bollinger Shipyards, Louisiana's largest Jones Act vessel builder, contributed an additional $24,300 to Cassidy in the same cycle. The money, the legislation, and the committee geography all occupy the same address.

The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, codified at 46 U.S.C. §55102, requires that any cargo moving between two U.S. ports travel on vessels that are built in the United States, owned at least 75 percent by U.S. citizens, registered under a U.S. flag, and crewed at least 75 percent by U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Enforcement sits with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The law creates what amounts to a legally mandated captive market. Every container moving from New Jersey to Puerto Rico, every barrel of oil support equipment transiting the Gulf of Mexico, every ton of freight heading from Seattle to Anchorage must travel on vessels that meet those four requirements — or their shipper must obtain a federal waiver.

The lobbying ecosystem that has grown around that captive market is documented and substantial. Seattle-based Saltchuk Resources — the privately held conglomerate whose subsidiaries TOTE Maritime and Foss Maritime operate Jones Act container shipping to Puerto Rico and Alaska — has disclosed $5.97 million in total lobbying spending across 131 filings since 2003, according to the Legis1 and OpenSecrets lobbying databases. As of the 2025-2026 congressional session, Saltchuk added an external firm, H.A. Cumber & Co. Inc., registering new lobbying activity timed to congressional debate on two pieces of legislation that directly serve Saltchuk's financial interests: the SHIPS for America Act, which would authorize federal subsidies for U.S.-built vessels, and the Maritime Fuel Tax Parity Act, which would reduce operating costs for LNG-powered ships — a technology in which TOTE Maritime already holds a first-mover competitive advantage. The specific dollar value of the H.A. Cumber engagement and the registration's LD-1 filing number are not yet public in available records.

On the labor side, the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department disclosed $262,200 in Jones Act lobbying spending in the first quarter of 2019 alone, per OpenSecrets. The AFL-CIO's alignment with domestic maritime corporations on this issue is politically significant: it creates a bipartisan protection coalition that pairs Democratic-aligned organized labor with Republican-allied shipping companies. MEBA's $238,000 in Q1 2019 Jones Act lobbying, following its record $837,000 full-year spend in 2018, illustrates the sustained financial commitment of that coalition. This alignment has historically made Jones Act waiver requests — including those sought during Hurricane Maria's devastation of Puerto Rico in 2017 — politically costly to grant even when humanitarian logistics demanded flexibility.

The opposition side is newer and thinner in disclosed dollars. Americans for Prosperity, the 501(c)(4) advocacy organization associated with the Koch network, formally entered the Jones Act lobbying contest on April 20, 2026, according to Bloomberg Law. AFP's argument centers on the law's cost burden on U.S. territories — Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Alaska, and Guam — where consumers have no alternative but to accept Jones Act shipping rates with no competitive foreign carrier to discipline prices. AFP's specific LD-1 registration details, named lobbyists, and disclosed spending figures for this engagement are not yet available in public filings reviewed for this report.

Adjacent to the core Jones Act fight, Carnival Corporation — the world's largest cruise operator, listed on both the NYSE and London Stock Exchange — has been spending to protect a different maritime legal privilege. Carnival's existing lobbying relationship with Penn Avenue Partners has totaled $3.2 million since 2013, per Legis1. In the current session, Carnival added Miller Strategies LLC, which simultaneously represents the Cruise Lines International Association, creating a coordinated company-plus-trade-association lobbying structure. The trigger appears to be the Cruise Passenger Protection Act, which would strip mandatory arbitration clauses from cruise contracts and expose Carnival to direct U.S. court jurisdiction over passenger injury and consumer claims. Miller Strategies' registration lists Travel/Tourism, Homeland Security, and Environmental issues — broad categories that avoid specifying the arbitration legislation by name, a standard tactic for maintaining flexibility while limiting public disclosure of specific legislative targets.

The analytical framework that matters here is the one CapitolExposed's investigations database makes explicit across its 103,449 lobbying filings and $815.6 billion in total disclosed spending: 'A trade plus lobbying activity is useful. A trade plus lobbying plus committee overlap plus vote timing is much stronger.' Applied to the Jones Act, the pattern is documentable but incomplete. What the public record shows is that Jones Act-compliant vessel operators contributed at least $96,700 to Sen. Cassidy in 2018 while simultaneously lobbying on Jones Act provisions affecting Gulf of Mexico offshore operations — Cassidy's home-state industry. What the public record does not yet show is how Cassidy voted on Jones Act waiver requests in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, what provisions of the Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2025 SEACOR Marine's lobbying registration specifically targets, what the four enumerated priorities in Saltchuk's H.A. Cumber registration actually state verbatim, and what cost figures Americans for Prosperity is deploying to make the consumer-harm case to swing-district members.

The instruments that would close those gaps are available and unused. SEACOR Marine's LD-2 quarterly disclosure filings, due 45 days after each quarter's close, must enumerate specific legislation by bill number — those filings, cross-referenced against floor votes and committee markups on the SHIPS for America Act, would confirm or deny whether SEACOR's lobbying dollars preceded favorable legislative outcomes. A FOIA request to the Department of Homeland Security for all Jones Act waiver applications received and denied between August and December 2017 — the period of Puerto Rico's post-Maria recovery — would document precisely which cargo types were blocked from foreign-flagged relief vessels and which members of Congress opposed emergency waivers while receiving Jones Act industry contributions. Those records are the ones that have not yet been published.