Washington finally pays full price to fly the flag. It still can't crew the fleet.

Fewer than 90 ocean-going ships fly the U.S. flag in international trade — MARAD estimates less than 2% of America's waterborne import/export commerce moves on them.▸ The Maritime Security Program (MSP) exists to keep 60 of those ships in business, paying their operators a fixed stipend to absorb the cost of U.S. registry in exchange for one promise: hand the ship, and its crew, to the Department of War on request during a war or national emergency. For 2026, Congress is finally paying what the law says the program is worth. The mariners who'd have to sail those ships in an actual mobilization are a separate, unsolved problem.

Every ship enrolled in MSP draws the same stipend, set in statute.▸ Under 46 U.S.C. § 53106, the payment is $6,500,000 per vessel for each of fiscal years 2025 and 2026 — up from $5,300,000 for FY2022–2024. Multiply that by the 60-ship fleet and FY2026's enacted appropriation of $390 million, reported in MARAD's FY2027 budget justification, lands exactly on the statutory number. Split across the fleet mix that same document reports — 29 containerships, 6 geared containerships, 20 roll-on/roll-off vessels, and 5 heavy-lift ships — the dollar breaks down like this:

That exact match is itself the story.▸ FY2026 is the first year MSP has been funded at the full rate the law sets. FY2024 and FY2025 were both funded at $318 million — 60 ships at the older $5.3-million rate, even though the statute had already moved the FY2025 rate to $6.5 million. For one full fiscal year, Congress appropriated a program below what its own authorizing statute promised operators.

The gap didn't go unnoticed.▸ In February 2026, the White House's America's Maritime Action Plan listed "fund the Maritime Security Program and Tanker Security Program to authorized levels" as a recommended policy action — an unusual admission, in an official planning document, that the government had been underpaying its own sealift subsidy.

Money can rebuild a fleet faster than it can rebuild a crew.▸ Sealift requirements aren't measured in ships; they're measured in mariners holding unlimited-tonnage credentials, and MARAD's own numbers say there aren't enough of them. A 2017 study by MARAD's Maritime Workforce Working Group found that fully activating the commercially operated U.S.-flagged fleet alongside a sustained military sealift effort would require 13,607 such mariners. The estimated pool of actively sailing, sealift-qualified mariners at the time was 11,768 — a deficit of 1,839. Maritime Administrator Ann C. Phillips reaffirmed that same figure, unchanged, in testimony to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in May 2023 — six years after the original study, with no newer count on the record since.

The gap shows up operationally, not just on paper.▸ In November 2024, the Navy confirmed it would sideline 17 Military Sealift Command ships — mostly expeditionary fast transports and support vessels — because it didn't have enough civilian mariners to keep them crewed at target readiness. Rear Adm. Philip Sobeck, MSC's commander, told reporters the number was sized to get the remaining fleet to 95% manning; idling those ships freed roughly 600 to 700 mariners for reassignment to higher-priority vessels. It is a fleet-management fix, not a workforce fix — MSC didn't gain new mariners, it just asked fewer ships to share the ones it already has.

The agency that runs the subsidy program is thin, too.▸ GAO found that MARAD itself — the roughly 800-person agency that administers MSP, the Ready Reserve Force, and mariner credentialing policy — had a 12.3% vacancy rate as of September 2024 (116 of 941 authorized positions), had separated 235 more employees than it hired over the prior decade, and expects the share of its staff eligible to retire to nearly double, from 24% in 2024 to 43% by 2029. One staffer, GAO noted, was responsible for administering all 60 MSP operating agreements and roughly $318 million in annual funding at the time of the review.

Money figures cover the federal fiscal year (October–September) as reported in MARAD's own congressional budget justifications; the mariner supply figures are the most recent official counts on record and are explicitly dated 2017/2023 in the text above, not current-year data.