Trump’s New Executive Order Leaves Mariner Crisis Unresolved: What’s Next?

by Captain John Konrad (gCaptain) This week President Trump signed a huge deal with French shipping giant CMA to build approximately 20 new U.S.-flagged ships and announced at the State of the Union address that the White House will soon open a new shipbuilding office.

The CMA deal is fantastic news for the US Merchant Marine, but where will we find the mariners? The United States is already facing a dire US Merchant Mariner shortage that has forced the Navy’s sealift fleet to scale back operations. Military Sealift Command plans to sideline as many as 19 naval support ships simply because there aren’t enough qualified Americans to crew them.

This slow-motion disaster is not just a labor issue—it’s a full-blown national security crisis. Will the new comprehensive executive order leaked from the National Security Council’s maritime department fix the problem? No, and its aggressive focus on shipbuilding and signing deals to expand the fleet could deepen the crisis.

How did we get here? A perfect storm of failed maritime policy, bureaucratic inertia, and regulatory overreach over the past decade has hollowed out our merchant marine, leaving warships without crews and supply lines in peril.

MARAD, Coast Guard and DOT: Years of Failure to Address the Workforce Crisis

It’s not as if warnings were lacking – they were simply ignored. Back in 2018, then-Maritime Administrator Mark Buzby under Trump 1.0  sounded the alarm before Congress, reporting a deficit of nearly 1,800 merchant mariners needed to crew a sustained sealift operation.

He urged urgent action to build up the mariner pipeline. Yet seven years and one pandemic later , that shortfall has only grown. Under Biden the Maritime Administration (MARAD) – along with its overseers at the Department of Transportation failed to produce a comprehensive workforce plan. Peter Buttigieg in fact ignored MARAD’s troubles his entire term. The Biden Administration failed to even update the 2018 manpower survey, Buzby created so we don’t know how many mariners exist today, let alone how many we need to fulfill Trump’s agressive shipbuilding plans.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard, which shares responsibility for mariner readiness, has been asleep at the wheel on workforce issues. MARAD officials themselves admit the situation has reached crisis levels, with mariner recruitment and retention problems “increasingly difficult” to manage

Related Article: Meet The Ghost Admiral Steering MARAD – The US Government’s Most Secretive Agency

In plain terms, our government dropped the ball: no sustained recruiting initiatives, no modern training pipeline, and no urgency. The consequences are severe—hundreds of American mariners have left the industry or retired without replacements, while new entrants remain scarce. Military Sealift Command has attempted to attract retired mariners for short-term sailing contracts, but burdensome dual training requirements—U.S. mariners must comply with both USCG and United Nations IMO STCW standards—make license renewal extremely challenging for those seeking to return. The situation is even more difficult for Navy and USCG veterans wanting to transition to commercial shipping.

The long-promised manpower study that could have spurred solutions is now seven years overdue and counting—a testament to bureaucratic foot-dragging. Yet even this delay pales in comparison to MARAD’s annual shipyard study, which is twenty years overdue and was meant to examine shipbuilding facilities and the workforce.

Bottom line: The agencies charged with supporting the merchant marine – MARAD, the Department of Transportation, and even the Coast Guard – failed spectacularly to head off this workforce crisis. They had years of advance warning and did next to nothing, and now the U.S. Navy is paying the price, with ships laid up for want of crews. This is a policy failure of the highest order, and the repercussions are unfolding in real time.

A Broken Credentialing System Sinks New Mariners

For those who do step up to serve at sea, another nightmare awaits: the Coast Guard’s mariner credentialing system. Mariners describe the National Maritime Center (NMC) – which issues licenses and documents – as a black hole of delay and dysfunction. Processing times that should be weeks routinely stretch to many months. “I’m hearing that it’s 6–8 months to renew a medical certificate these days,” reported one veteran mariner, calling the NMC a “worthless failed agency” as credentials languish in endless backlogs

Horror stories are common: mariners lose job opportunities—or even miss job calls entirely—because their license renewals languish in an NMC queue for six months or longer. Basic medical approvals take months even when licensed doctors provide a clean bill of health.

Officially, the Coast Guard claims average credential processing is around 60 days – already too slow – but a 2023 GAO study shows some applications taking over a year to complete.

And right now none of this is even possible because the USCG’s Homeport website to manage applications has been broken for over a week.

This is unacceptable in any industry, let alone one as vital to national security. Every delay keeps a qualified mariner ashore and an employer short-handed. Mariners spend hundreds of dollars on courses and fees only to be left “sitting on the beach and waiting” for the Coast Guard to sign off

The credentialing chaos isn’t just frustrating – it’s directly contributing to the mariner shortage by driving people out of the profession. Many older mariners simply give up on renewals and retire early rather than wade through the red tape, while prospective new mariners see the hassle and think twice about a seafaring career.

Despite repeated calls from industry to streamline and modernize the process, the USCG’s National Maritime Center remains a bottleneck. Mariners must navigate confusing requirements, lost paperwork, and poor communication, only to face unpredictable wait times that can cost them months of income. In an era when the nation badly needs more mariners, the very system meant to credential and enable them is instead blocking them. This bureaucratic logjam is self-inflicted damage to our maritime workforce – and it needs a top-to-bottom overhaul, fast.

Navy Reserve’s Merchant Marine Program – A Poorly Managed Mess

A lesser-known but critical component of our sealift capability is the Merchant Marine Reserve, now known as the Strategic Sealift Officer (SSO) program within the Navy Reserve. In theory, this program maintains a roster of licensed merchant mariners (mostly maritime academy graduates) who serve as Navy Reserve officers, ready to sail on government ships in a crisis. In practice, it has been hamstrung by mismanagement and neglect by the Navy itself. The Navy Reserve has utterly failed to effectively utilize or even track its pool of merchant mariner–reservists.

One glaring indicator: when calculating manpower for a major sealift, the government double counted hundreds of these reserve mariners – essentially counting the same individual twice, as a civilian mariner and as a Navy reservist. This statistical blunder, noted in a recent workforce report, means the true mariner shortfall could be even worse than reported. It underscores a reality that many in the program attest to:

there is little coordination between the Navy and the merchant marine

. Strategic Sealift Officers often receive minimal guidance, inconsistent training opportunities, and sometimes no communication at all from their Navy Reserve chain of command. Many SSOs simply fulfill the bare minimum requirements and drift away, never to be tapped in a real emergency.

The U.S. Navy Reserve’s inability to manage the Merchant Marine Reserve is a huge missed opportunity. Here we have a group of motivated, trained mariners who want to serve in time of need – but there’s no effective strategy to keep them engaged, qualified, and ready. Instead of being integrated as a cornerstone of sealift readiness, the SSO program has been treated as an afterthought. Some SSOs report that the Navy seems more interested in paperwork compliance than in actually building a capable reserve of merchant mariners. The result is predictably dismal: the program’s contribution to alleviating the mariner shortage is effectively zero right now.

Without serious reform, the Merchant Marine Reserve will remain a paper force – names on a list that look reassuring until you actually need to crew a ship. The Navy must own up to this dysfunction. If 19 Navy support ships are sitting idle for lack of crews, one would think the Navy Reserve would mobilize every available merchant mariner in its ranks. That hasn’t happened. And considering – unlike the USAF National Guard and Reserve which operates planes – the US Navy Reserve has no ships of it’s own to train on.

The organizational disconnect between the Navy and the merchant marine community continues, to the detriment of national readiness.

Barriers for Navy Veterans – Wasted Talent Amid Shortage

It is deeply ironic that while the maritime industry scrambles for qualified mariners, thousands of experienced Navy veterans – men and women who have spent careers at sea – struggle to transition into civilian merchant marine jobs. The intent has always been to encourage Navy (and Coast Guard) veterans to bring their seamanship skills to the commercial fleet. But rigid regulations – including many dictated by the United Nation’s International Maritime Organization – and lack of credit for military seatime has created high barriers to entry for these veterans, effectively turning away perfectly good mariners.

The problem lies in how the Coast Guard evaluates military sea service and training. Only a fraction of a veteran’s sea time counts toward a merchant license, and even that time is often downgraded. For example, official policy only accepts 60% of sea time accrued on military vessels toward a civilian deck license, and then only if the ships were above certain tonnage. A Navy bosun or helmsman with years of bridge watchstanding may still have to start from scratch to get a Third Mate’s license. Engineers face similar hurdles. A Navy engineering Chief with 20 years in the engine room might not qualify for even a lower-level Coast Guard license without extensive additional coursework, because the Navy training isn’t automatically recognized for civilian credential standards.

These onerous cross-over requirements mean many veterans simply don’t bother pursuing merchant careers – it’s too much bureaucracy, too much time, and too expensive to retrain when they already have the skills. Those who do try often hit frustrating snags: records lost, sea service translations delayed, or being told to repeat basic courses in firefighting or lifeboat operations that they’ve effectively been doing their whole career. As one Coast Guard memo admits, the process is “so complicated” that it deters capable applicants.

While the Biden administration focused heavily on diversity initiatives and expanded DEI programs at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, their adoption of stricter UN IMO training requirements and complex environmental regulations effectively restricted the traditional path for minority officers: the hawsepipe—where mariners begin as seamen and advance through experience without attending college.

This is a travesty. At a time when every mariner matters, we are leaving a huge talent pool untapped. Navy and Coast Guard veterans are disciplined, safety-conscious, and intimately familiar with ship life—exactly the kind of people needed in the Merchant Marine. Yet bureaucratic overkill has shut the door both to them and to unlicensed U.S. Merchant Mariners seeking to become officers. Policymakers need to tear down these barriers through common-sense fixes: increased credit for military qualifications, streamlined equivalency exams, and funded transition programs. Every Navy sailor who wants to continue sailing under a merchant flag should have a clear, supported path forward. Instead, the merchant fleet remains needlessly short of thousands of mariners.

Mariners Excluded from Policy Fellowships – “Decisions Made by the Uninformed”

One of the root causes of this mess is that actual merchant mariners have long been excluded from the halls of powerwhere maritime policy is set. Instead, maritime decisions – whether at the Pentagon, in Congress, or even within DOT – are often made by officials with little to no merchant marine experience. It shows. The lack of understanding of the mariner perspective has led to policy blunders that exacerbate the shortage. Yet, incredibly, the U.S. has no formal pipeline to bring mariners into policymaking roles inside the Beltway. This leaves places like the National Security Council reliant on Navy veterans who have no experience in these problems. When they can’t be found organizations pick up maritime lobbiest who have failed in their job for decades.

Consider the various prestigious military or federal fellowship programs and war colleges. They routinely include officers from the Navy, Air Force, Army, even Coast Guard – but not Merchant Marine professionals. There are naval officers spending a year on Capitol Hill or at think tanks learning policy, but virtually zero representation from the merchant marine in those spaces. The result is a glaring knowledge gap. As one recent study noted, institutions like the Naval War College – which ban most US Merchant Mariners from attending – focus on combat naval strategy, with a “notable absence” of academic focus on maritime logistics, sealift, and the merchant marine.

Even the new maritime office in the White House NSC is chock full of military servicemen and congressional staffers but not a single US Merchant Marine captain or chief engineer.

In other words, the people planning our national security logistics often don’t know what they don’t know about the merchant fleet, especially when it comes to manpower problems.

This exclusion has real consequences. Maritime policy has been dominated by Navy and DoD viewpoints, where strategic sealift is an abstract concept rather than a lived reality. Without mariners at the table, issues like credentialing delays, mariner pay and conditions, or training investment never get the attention they deserve. For example, would the National Maritime Center’s dysfunction have been tolerated so long if more policymakers had sailing experience and experienced the frustrations first hand? Unlikely. Would Congress have waited years for MARAD to produce a manpower report if a few staffers had merchant marine backgrounds? Probably not. Would national security think tanks offer better solutions if it had US Merchant Mariners on staff? Yet here we are, with decisions being made in a vacuum of real-world merchant marine input.

Fixing this requires deliberate effort: include merchant marine senior officers in key fellowships and advisory roles, create slots for them at war colleges and in legislative liaison offices, and elevate the U.S. Maritime Service as a voice in national security circles. The maritime industry has brilliant professionals who have sailed into war zones, managed global shipping operations, and understand the workforce challenges firsthand. Those voices need to be heard. Until they are, we will continue to see well-meaning but uninformed officials crafting policies that simply don’t align with on-the-ground realities of crewing ships. In short, we must end the era of maritime decisions being made about mariners, without mariners.

Trump Administration’s Bold Moves: A Ray of Hope Amid the Gloom

In sharp contrast to the years of inaction, the past few months have seen an assertive push from the White House to address both the fleet and the workforce. President Donald Trump has zeroed in on the maritime crisis, tying it directly to economic and national security. His administration recently struck a headline-grabbing deal with French shipping giant CMA CGM to invest in America’s maritime industry – a $20+ billion initiative that will literally put more ships under the U.S. flag. The deal, announced in the Oval Office with CMA CGM’s CEO Rodolphe Saadé, will reportedly triple the company’s U.S.-flagged fleet, adding dozens of new merchant ships and 10,000 American jobs in shipping and logistics

This infusion of vessels and opportunities could be transformative, boosting the tiny pool of billets for mariners and revitalizing related sectors like ports and shipyards, but it’s a chicken-and-egg problem. More billets will incentivize more mariners to join the industry but who will sail these ships as new recruits work up the pipeline?

At the same time, Trump used a high-profile address to Congress to announce the creation of a new White House Office of Shipbuilding to coordinate maritime industrial policy.

This move is unprecedented – essentially putting shipbuilding and merchant marine revitalization on the White House agenda alongside national defense. “We will bring this industry home to America,” Trump declared, outlining plans for special tax incentives to rebuild our shipyard capacity.

The only problem? Multiple sources inside the White House tell us that initial plans to stand up a dedicated shipbuilding office have been scrapped. It will now be held inside the maritime directorate at NSC. The fear among maritime and naval experts we interviewed in DC is that the shipbuilding crisis will overwhelm the small office and drain their attention to other critical concerns leaving major gaps in manpower, readiness and repair.

There is also a fear that hosting the office solely in the NSC – with the majority of the staff having military backgrounds – rather than the National Economic Council (NEC), may cause them to miss the economic opportunities to recruit, train and employ a strong workforce.

China’s dominance in shipbuilding (over 250 times the US capacity) is a strategic threat and that the U.S. must respond with a whole-of-government approach and it’s clear that the President’s mandate is too big for the NSC to manage alone. We need maritime departments in other top executive agencies.

National Security Council Maritime Department

This is not to disparage in any way the new NSC maritime department. They are off to a fast start nailing several impressive wins, but not much is known about the senior director Ian Bennitt apart from his resume as a congressional staffer and shipbuilding lobbyist. Personally, I’ve never seen him speak at an industry conference like Workboat, CMA shipping, or Marine Money. Outside DC, he seems to be unknown, but inside DC, many praise his work in Congress.

We do know he’s working hard on the problem because 17-page draft executive order written by his team has leaked.

Crucially, this EO not only targets ship construction, but also the maritime manpower pipeline. According to officials familiar with the draft, it’s an 18-point plan aiming to resuscitate the domestic shipbuilding base and broader maritime industry. Measures include establishing a dedicated funding trust for maritime programs, providing incentives for mariner education, and raising revenue to fund these efforts via fees on foreign shipping.

gCaptain has obtained a copy and, in reading the EO, the intent is clear: to fix the entire ecosystem from the docks to the decks, from shipyards to licensing bureaus and finance. It’s a tall order but the question remains: if enacted can the order could cut through the tangle of issues choking the Merchant Marine manpower crisis?

Maybe.

The 17-page order is comprehensive but only addresses the mariner shortage in a single section that’s focused primarily on education and training. And that section only does two things: mandate “the Secretaries of Defense, Labor, Transportation, Education, and Homeland Security shall deliver a report” and begin urgently needed facility repair work at the US Merchant Marine Academy on Long Island.

This is an excellent first step but will the report be finished on time? Will another EO be needed to address the mariner shortage once the report is complete? Why aren’t known problems like the broken USCG credentialling website and medical double checks addressed directly? Why not sever the United Nations IMO requirements immediatly?

This call for a study is in stark contrast to other sections of the report with specific action items like directing DOGE to cut shipbuilding procurement red tape, activate strategic capital for shipbuilders, target PRC ships, write nuclear contracts, invest in infrastructure aboard, and tax credits to shipbuilders (but not mariners).

Action This Day: Maritime Industry at the Tipping Point

It’s hard to overstate the urgency of this manpower crisis. We have Navy oilers and supply ships stuck pier-side for no other reason than a lack of crew. We have a Ready Reserve Force of transport ships that, if activated for a major conflict, literally will not be able to leave port due to manning shortfalls. What’s the point of having hundreds of thousands of Army soldiers paid and ready if we can’t move them overseas? Isn’t having a large standing Army incapable of being deployed unconstitutional? How will we evacuate soldiers stranded overseas during war if we can’t crew our ships?

Our strategic sealift — the “Fourth Arm of Defense” — is on the verge of collapse at the very moment global threats are rising. Every day that passes without enough mariners is a day our adversaries take note of our logistical Achilles’ heel.

Related Article: Op-Ed: U.S. Merchant Mariner Shortage Demands Action Now

The recent moves by the Trump administration are the first real signs of hope in a long time but NSC assuming the role of the Shipbuilding Office, instead of allowing a dedicated one to be created by NEC or OMB, on top of continuing work on tariffs, alliances, infrastructure, finance, arctic strategy and the other 18 objectives outlined in the EO reminds us of the reason US Merchant Mariner credentialing is broken in the first place: the USCG tries to do too much with too little resources and lets uniformed officers make decisions without brining US Merchant Mariners in house.

My suggestion? Expand the NSC maritime office but let them focus on national security implications of maritime policy. Create the dedicated Shipbuilding Office Trump asked for as an independent stand alone White House Agency outside of NSC. Then put manpower, taxes, finance and tariffs in a maritime department at the NEC. Staff all three with at least a few US Merchant Marine captains or vets.

And, of course, they will have to work closely together and share notes. They should also push for US Merchant Marine captains to be appointed in other positions throughout the government starting with the US Maritime Administration at DOT which typically – with poor results – selects a Navy Admiral instead of Merchant Mariner to lead.

Bennitt’s team doing so much so quickly is highly admirable and impressive, they deserve every mariners appreciation – but – as the failure of their comprehensive draft EO to recommend direct actions to fix manpower issues shows, critical balls will be dropped if the small team of military officers, congressional staffers, and former lobbyists without direct shipping and shipyard experience try to do everything themselves.

All that said, despite the many concerns, the Trump administration is serious about these problems and has done more for the US Merchant Marine in a few weeks than Buttigieg and Biden did their entire term.