by Lacey Pfalz
Last updated: 9:00 AM ET, Wed November 19, 2025
The U.S. Department of Justice is getting involved in the lawsuit between the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) against the state of Hawaii’s so-called “Green Fee,” which would go into effect on January 1, 2026, adding a new tax on all accommodations in the state, including cruise ships.
The Green Fee, hailed as the first piece of legislation of its kind in the United States and celebrated among Hawaiian environmental advocacy groups as a way to fund the conservation of the state’s natural treasures and climate disaster mitigation efforts, found its biggest challenge after its passage into law: taxing cruise ships.
Now, in a battle between short-term profit and long-term environmental goals, the Department of Justice is taking the side of CLIA, filing a motion to intervene in the lawsuit on November 13, which is currently under review, according to sister publication Travel Weekly.
CLIA issued the lawsuit on August 27, 2025 in the U.S. District Court in Honolulu, arguing that the new tax on cruise ships violates the Constitution’s Tonnage Clause and the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act of 1884, both which place limits for taxation on ships.
"Hawaii unabashedly boasts that this revenue is not for the purpose of paying for services actually provided to incoming cruise ships or their passengers, but for funding climate change initiatives in Hawaii," the motion says. "This scheme to extort American citizens and businesses solely to benefit Hawaii flies in the face of federal law twice over, conflicting both with the Tonnage Clause of the U.S. Constitution and the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act of 1884."
The lawsuit, however, has not been decided.
When CLIA threatened the lawsuit back in May, Hawaii Governor Josh Green and the Hawaiian legislature were overwhelmingly in favor of the new tax. Green said: “We had a $13 billion tragedy in Maui and we lost 102 people,” Green explained, referring to the devastating Maui wildfires that “These kind[s] of dollars will help us prevent that next disaster.”
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