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Duffy Leads the National Maritime Day Observance, May 22, 2025

May 22, 2025 · US Department of Transportation · 0:43:42

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What happened

Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy delivered remarks at the National Maritime Day 2025 Observance at the Department of Transportation’s headquarters in Washington, in the department’s upload of the May 22, 2025 ceremony, whose theme — Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance — the department’s description states, reflecting a renewed commitment to shipbuilding, supply chain resilience, and the maritime workforce. The program, as the description lists the speakers, also carried U.S. Transportation Command’s LTG Jered P. Helwig, Interlake Steamship Company president Mark Barker, and the Maritime Administration’s chief counsel Elizabeth O’Connor.

Duffy’s remarks made the shipbuilding gap the center of the case as he stated the figures: in 2022, U.S. shipyards produced five ships while China built nearly 1,800 and dominated half the global market; last year alone, he said, a single Chinese shipbuilder produced more commercial vessels than the entire U.S. industry since World War II. America, he said, has never won a war without its merchant mariners or without being able to build ships — more than 6,700 mariners died in World War II, as he stated the toll — and a global superpower, he argued, has to build ships in its own country and sail them with its own mariners, which is why the President’s maritime executive order is now being turned into requirements by the department, as he described the work under way. He also carried the Merchant Marine Academy’s condition into the record as he described his Kings Point visit: midshipmen with mold in the dorms who went four months without hot water and eat off paper plates because the dishwasher is broken, as he stated the conditions.

Why it matters

The observance is the maritime-dominance doctrine stated as a build program — an executive order being converted into department requirements — with the measure of the problem fixed on the record in one comparison, five American ships against nearly 1,800 Chinese ones in a single year, as the Secretary stated it.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard candidate: the department’s work, stated May 22, 2025, to convert the President’s maritime executive order into shipbuilding and mariner-workforce requirements. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Transportation, “National Maritime Day Observance with Secretary Duffy” (official upload, embedded above; description dates the observance May 22, 2025 and names the speakers). Remarks and figures as delivered by Secretary Duffy at the ceremony.