Oil Prices Today: Trump Extends Jones Act Waiver 90 Days

The latest oil prices today story from Washington is about a shipping waiver, not a price quote, but it reaches the same American wallets. President Donald Trump extended for 90 days on Friday a waiver of the Jones Act, the century-old law that normally bars foreign ships from carrying goods between American ports, a White House official said. The decision keeps open a channel that has moved tens of millions of barrels of fuel around the country since March, and it comes as the war with Iran continues to squeeze energy markets and push up the cost of moving fuel by sea.

The extension was widely expected, but it was not a formality. A day earlier, industry sources had told Reuters that the administration would extend the waiver, while a White House official said on Thursday that no decision had yet been made. The decision came on Friday, a day later than first reported, and it makes the waiver the longest in the history of the shipping law, heading into its ninth month.

Gas Prices Today: What the Extension Does

The extension takes effect at midnight Eastern time on Monday, November 16, with no gap in coverage, and cargo covered by it must be loaded before 11.59pm Eastern time on February 14, 2027. The formal word came in updated guidance from US Customs and Border Protection, which said the Department of Homeland Security had approved a third 90-day extension of the March waiver, again at the request of the Department of War. A White House official confirmed the same day that the president had extended the waiver. There was no White House press release; the customs guidance is the formal record of the decision.

The covered products are the same as in the August extension: gasoline, jet fuel, crude oil, naphtha, liquefied natural gas, soy oil and fertilisers. The case-by-case review introduced in August also continues unchanged, meaning each voyage is still checked first to see whether an American ship can do the job before a foreign vessel is allowed to sail. The waiver is therefore not a blanket opening of American waters. It is a managed exception, granted voyage by voyage, for cargo the domestic fleet cannot carry.

The Jones Act: A 1920 Law Under Strain

The Jones Act is the shipping section of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920. It requires that cargo moving between American ports be carried on ships built in the United States, owned by American companies and crewed by American workers. The law was written to protect a domestic merchant fleet and shipbuilding industry, and it has survived a century of challenges because that industry, and the jobs and shipyards behind it, remain a powerful presence in American politics.

The strain comes from the shape of the modern fleet. The United States has very few tankers that qualify under the law, and none that can carry some products at all, which means fuel often cannot legally move by water between American ports even when it is needed. Hawaii is the sharpest example: the islands depend on shipping for more than 90 percent of their goods, including nearly all of their fossil fuel products, and they have almost no domestic tanker service. Puerto Rico faces the same problem, and economists have estimated that the law costs its economy 1.4 billion dollars a year.

That is why the waiver has become a live argument rather than a technicality. Supporters of the law say it protects American maritime jobs and the shipbuilding base a country needs in wartime. Critics say it acts as a tax on every barrel that has to move by water, paid by consumers in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Alaska and on the West Coast, and that it has left the country with too few ships for its own needs. The 2026 waivers have turned that old argument into a real-world experiment, with months of data on what happens when the restriction is lifted.

Economy News: What the Waiver Has Moved So Far

The story began on March 17, when the Department of Homeland Security issued the longest and broadest Jones Act waiver since at least 1950, covering energy commodities and fertiliser inputs. It came a month after the United States launched the war on Iran, which had scrambled energy markets and effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, sending fuel prices jumping. The administration said foreign tankers moving Gulf Coast fuel to both coasts would ease shortages, and the first waiver ran for 60 days and covered more than 600 product categories.

It was extended for 90 days in May and again in August, when the product list was narrowed and the voyage-by-voyage review was introduced. The White House said that since the waiver was first issued in March, an additional 90 million barrels of petroleum, mostly refined products, have been shipped between American ports under it, including 27 million barrels of gasoline and 26 million barrels of crude oil. An analysis by the Cato Institute in October put the figure at more than 300 voyages carrying over 80 million barrels since March 17, with deliveries to the West Coast, Alaska and Hawaii reaching 20.7 million barrels in about seven months.

The official count of individual permissions tells the same story of a system that started wide and then tightened. Administration data cited by Reuters show about 300 waivers granted under the broad March and May versions of the programme, and about 48 under the narrower August rules. Each completed voyage must be reported to the Maritime Administration within 10 days, which is why the public totals are described as a floor rather than a complete count: the full picture always lags the ships by a few weeks.

The routes the waiver opened are the ones that matter most. Fuel has moved from the Gulf Coast to the West Coast, where refineries and drivers had faced some of the tightest supplies in the country, to the East Coast, and to Puerto Rico, which received propane and other products it had barely been able to import by water for years because there are no Jones Act tankers for liquefied gas.

The Savings Debate: Pennies or Real Relief?

The argument that has followed the waiver from the start is how much it actually saves. The cleanest published estimate comes from the American Action Forum, which in September put the avoided freight penalties at 99.9 million to 110.1 million dollars across the waiver’s run, or about 2.80 dollars a barrel on Gulf Coast to West Coast shipments, roughly 6.6 cents a gallon, with smaller savings on other routes. Analysts told Reuters that the extra tankers would likely trim pump prices by only pennies a gallon, a modest effect on a national scale.

Supporters of the extension say the freight bill is the wrong place to look. The larger gain, they argue, is the shortages that did not happen: fuel that reached California, Puerto Rico and parts of the East Coast that the domestic fleet could not have delivered in time, and supply lines that stayed open while the war disrupted global shipping. For Hawaii, the case was made in Congress as well. Representative Ed Case, who represents the state’s first district, wrote to the president in April asking for the waiver to be extended, warning that any lapse while the war disrupted oil markets would heighten the risk of interrupted deliveries and drive already high prices higher still.

The debate is not abstract for the people who pay the prices. Hawaii’s isolation means nearly everything arrives by ship, and the state’s gasoline and energy costs are among the highest in the country. Puerto Rico, which also depends on imported fuel, has lived with the same arithmetic for decades. For both, the waiver has been a glimpse of what shipping costs look like without the century-old restriction, and that glimpse is now part of the political argument about whether the law should be reformed rather than waived.

Business News: What Happens Next

The extension runs into February, and the questions it raises will not wait until then. The first is whether the administration will keep extending the waiver in 90-day increments, or whether Congress will be asked to suspend the law for longer. Some analysts have argued for a two-year suspension, saying that would give policymakers time to measure the results properly: new trade, changes in transport costs, and any effects on domestic shipping capacity and maritime employment. The existing waiver authority is tied to national-defence requirements, so a longer suspension would need Congress to act.

The second question is what happens to the domestic fleet. The waiver was granted because there were too few American ships to move the fuel, and the shipbuilding lobby that defends the Jones Act will argue that the answer is to build more ships, not to keep waiving the law. The administration has paired the waivers with talk of yard modernisation and support for American shipbuilding, but new tankers take years to build, and the fuel needs to move now. That tension, between a long-term industrial policy and a short-term supply problem, is the heart of the dispute.

The third question is political. Fuel costs were a live issue in the midterm elections on November 3, in which Republicans lost control of the House and the Senate, and voters in rural and coastal states alike felt the pressure of war-driven price spikes. Keeping fuel moving, and keeping its price down, is now a visible test for the White House, and the waiver is one of the few levers the administration can pull without Congress. How the next three months of shipping data look will shape whether the extension is renewed again in February, or whether the debate moves on to a bigger reform.

For now, the ships keep sailing. The extension that takes effect on Monday means foreign-flagged tankers will continue to carry American fuel between American ports through the winter, when heating demand rises and the stakes of a supply failure are highest. The waiver remains the longest in the law’s history, heading into its ninth month, and the argument over what it has saved, and what it has cost, will continue for as long as it runs.

Source: Reuters