Facilitating Leadership and Expertise through Exchange and Training in Shipbuilding Now Act of 2026

Short title— This Act may be cited as the “Facilitating Leadership and Expertise through Exchange and Training in Shipbuilding Now Act of 2026” or the “FLEETS Now Act”.

Table of contents— The table of contents for this Act is as follows:

The People’s Republic of China (hereafter in this section referred to as the “PRC”) has deployed unfair and non-market-oriented practices in the maritime, logistics, and shipbuilding sectors to achieve a long-term dominant position in the shipbuilding ecosystem. In response, the United States Trade Representative launched an investigation under title III of the Trade Act of 1974 in April 2024, and reaffirmed its allegations in a notice of proposed actions in February 2025.

The PRC’s Military-Civil Fusion strategy uses the opacity of China’s business ecosystem to channel commercial activities—including foreign shipbuilding orders—into upgrading its naval industrial base. By integrating commercial and military production at shared shipyards, the PRC enables the transfer of capital, technology, personnel, and supply chains to China’s defense industrial base, strengthening military capabilities through civilian contracts.

The PRC frames its shipbuilding and maritime sectors as strategic industries that must be targeted to build economic, technological and military power. This targeting necessarily means the displacement of foreign firms from existing markets, and taking new markets as they present, which diminishes competition. The United States has not taken sufficient action to counter the PRC and protect United States enterprises.

By achieving dominant market positions, the PRC exercises increasing influence over global supply, pricing, and access to goods and services.

The PRC’s targeting of the maritime, logistics, and shipbuilding sectors creates dependencies on China, increasing risk and reducing supply chain resilience. The PRC seeks to displace foreign competitors throughout the maritime value chain in domestic and foreign markets, increasing the world’s dependence on the PRC for products, services, and technology.

International dependencies on the PRC increases risks (potential disruptions, whether natural, accidental, or politically motivated) for individual firms and their workers, for economic sectors, and supply chain resilience. The PRC has demonstrated its willingness to weaponize dependencies for the purpose of economic coercion.

The PRC’s control over Chinese economic actors in the maritime, logistics, and shipbuilding sectors enables China to direct and influence commercial behavior in pursuit of market dominance in ways that run counter to fair competition and market-oriented principles.

The PRC’s industrial plans identify a matrix of mechanisms that are used to achieve market dominance, including government financial support, barriers for foreign firms, consolidation policies, measures associated with forced technology transfer and intellectual property theft, state-led investments, and government procurement.

As a result of the PRC’s market distortion, Chinese maritime, logistics, and shipbuilding sectors accrue a wide range of non-market advantages, such as artificially low costs or preferential supply from China’s non-market excess capacity, including in steel, China’s lack of effective labor rights, and China’s control over digital logistics services.

The PRC’s direct intervention in the shipbuilding market makes ships built in the United States and elsewhere commercially less competitive. Less than one percent of new commercial ships are built in the United States and domestic shipbuilding is almost exclusively for military use.

In 2024, the PRC accounted for 53.3 percent of the global shipbuilding industry and the China State Shipbuilding Corporation built more commercial ships by tonnage in 2024 than the entire United States shipbuilding industry has built since the end of World War II.

The state-owned shipbuilding conglomerates like China Ocean Shipping Company Shipping Heavy Industry and China State Shipbuilding Corporation are China’s largest commercial shipbuilding corporations and the primary entities responsible for the buildup of the People’s Liberation Army Navy into the world’s largest navy enabling the PRC to increase its capacity to undermine United States national security interests.

The shipbuilding capacity of the United States has been weakened by decades of neglect, leading to a contraction of a once vibrant domestic maritime workforce while simultaneously empowering our adversaries, eroding United States national security, and reducing American jobs in the maritime sector.

Increasing domestic shipbuilding capacity is essential to restoring America’s maritime strength and self-sufficiency. This will require coordinated action across procurement policy, capital investment, supplier resilience, and workforce development.

According to America’s Maritime Action Plan from February 2026, the United States does not have the capacity necessary to scale up the domestic shipbuilding industry to the rate required to meet national priorities.

For decades, the United States strategic position and shipbuilding industrial capacity have been weakened, in part, by cumbersome Government procurement processes, a lack of strategic support for construction of commercial vessels in domestic shipyards, and the degradation of Federal financial investment in the Maritime Industrial Base.

Strengthening the United States maritime sector requires leveraging international and industry partnerships to align trade policies to enhance investment in the United States maritime sector. By creating clear pathways for foreign direct investments in United States shipyards, suppliers, and maritime infrastructure, the United States can expand domestic capacity while reinforcing relationships abroad.

Currently, foreign firms are severely disadvantaged in competing with the resources of the Chinese state, resulting in lost sales, under-investment in capacity, diminished ability to attract financing, and lost jobs and lower wages.

Foreign companies, including firms based in many United States-allied countries purchase 75 percent of the ships built at China’s dual-use shipyards, funneling billions of dollars in revenue and transferring key technologies into the People’s Liberation Army naval industrial base.

The United States does not have a single agency or department charged with designing and implementing industrial shipbuilding policy. As a result, there is no single official charged with protecting and expanding the domestic shipbuilding industry in the United States. This creates inefficiency in reinvigorating the United States shipbuilding industry and confusion when engaging international partners about joint strategies for diversifying shipbuilding supply chains.

The President’s Maritime Action Plan outlines a strategy for reclaiming America’s maritime strength, ensuring the Nation can defend its interests and ferry its trade. In implementing the Maritime Action Plan, the United States will modernize its procurement processes and streamline regulations to accelerate shipbuilding and reduce costs.

Allied country— The term allied country has the meaning given such term in section 2350f(d) of title 10, United States Code.

Appropriate congressional committees— The term appropriate congressional committees means—

Deck-plate professional— The term deck-plate professional means a skilled worker who operates directly on the production floor as a skilled tradesperson with specialized expertise related to a ship’s systems and functionality.

Foreign country of concern— The term foreign country of concern has the meaning given the term covered nation in section 4872(f) of title 10, United States Code.

Unreasonable refusal to deal— The term unreasonable refusal to deal has the meaning given that term for purposes of section 7(d) of the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022 (46 U.S.C. 41104 note).