Page 21: of Marine News Magazine (May 2022)

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and its recommendations to the Secretary of Transpor- tation and to MARAD re? ect that in fact its attention and deliberations encompass a much wider array of top- ics. The following are a few examples from a MTSNAC memorandum of September 29, 2020 of the 32 actions that MTSNAC recommended be taken by the Secretary of Transportation: • support the acceleration of the acquisition of used ships to replace ships in the Ready Reserve Fleet; • in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, advocate for requiring all U.S. owned fuel that is moved worldwide within the Defense Logistics Agency 162,000 members network to be carried on U.S. ? ag ships; and • support legislation to eliminate the 50% ad valorem duty on vessel overseas maintenance and repairs when non-availability of a U.S. shipyard has been determined.

According to the MTSNAC website its 28 members in- clude representatives of international ocean carriers, deep water container ports, shipyards, and international labor unions. All of these interests are appropriate and indeed necessary for the broad scope of topics that MTSNAC ac- tually deals with in practice, but they have at most only a tangential relationship to what are the real impediments to greater effectiveness of the Marine Highways Program in ful? lling its original mission.

A more apt model would be the Inland Waterways

Users Board (IWUB) which monitors the Inland Wa- terways Trust Fund and makes recommendations to the

Army Corps of Engineers and to Congress on invest- ment priorities using resources from the Fund. IWUB is comprised of 11 representatives of shippers and carriers who represent a balance of navigation industry interests, companies of different sizes, and a variety of waterborne commodities. The compact size and speci? c focus of the

IWUB have made it an effective and ef? cient collabora- tion between the Corps of Engineers and the users of the inland waterways. The creation of a similarly sized and focused committee to advise MARAD on the Ma- rine Highways Program would be another suggestion for the next WRDA.

The Marine Highways Program has the potential to play a much larger role in moving cargo from the roads to the rivers than it has achieved so far.