Seatrade Maritime: Momentum slows on Trump’s US maritime action plans
The 2026 edition of the HACC NACC conference, organised by Hellenic American and Norwegian American Chambers of Commerce in New York, comes nearly a year after Executive Actions from Trump’s White House that set plans in motion for a broad revival of the United States’ commercial shipbuilding capabilities. On a panel regarding US investments into the sphere, the Moderator, Brian Devine, a Partner in the maritime group at Norton Rose Fulbright LLC, asked speakers to report on progress so far.
Jeremy Borkowski, a top executive at equipment financier Auxilior Capital Partners, suggested that there are signs of optimism, including a US shipyard client looking to raise $100 million in advance of vessel upgrade work, “but, I would say – tangible results to date – no.”
A harsher view came from panel member James Lightbourn, who is migrating from his well-known financing boutique Cavalier Shipping to a start-up still in “stealth” mode, who explained that an early 2025 Executive Order from the White House called for a US Maritime Action Plan, to be promulgated in the first weeks of November 2025.
“No one has seen it,” Lightbourn said, adding that: “From what I’ve heard, the deadline for its release is getting kicked farther and farther down the road…there’s some speculation about whether its’ going to get released at all.” He noted that a slowdown in the momentum for developing a US shipping capability, which was strong at the beginning of the Trump 2.0 term, which began in January 2025, has eased.
He also raised questions about the SHIPS Act saying, “That has not progressed much”. The act is a bi-partisan package to promote US shipbuilding introduced into the US Senate in late 2024 and re-introduced into the new Congress in January 2026. Alluding to sharp disagreements between President Donald Trump, and Democrat Senator Mark Kelley), one of the SHIPS Act’s sponsors, Lightbourne attributed its slow progress to political differences- rather than a dispute over policy aims.
Panelist Kevin O’Hara from Fearnley Securities offered that: “If you talk to anyone on the shipowner side, there’s definitely a lot of skepticism as to whether anything will come out of this…where you don’t see skepticism is on the shipyard side.”
He pointed to the Hanwha acquisition of the Philly Shipyard, and to the just announced acquisition of West Coast shipbuilding Vigor by the French investor Antin Infrastructure Funds, noting that the investors’ motivations may be aimed more at military ship construction rather than commercial.
The fervor in the air at the conference venue was visible later in the day on a different panel, when shipowner Josh Shapiro, who heads up Liberty Maritime- a company actively involved in the US Maritime Security Program suggested that “the Ships for America Act should be called the Cargo for America Act”.
Shapiro, a third-generation leader in the family company, said: “We’ve all heard the old adage that cargo is king…you can build a lot of ships, but if they don’t have any cargo, they’re not going to go anywhere.”
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