President Biden invites shipper input for supply chain task force as woes persist

Ocean ships backed up by the dozens at both East and West Coast ports. Railroad delays worsening in the critical hub of Chicago. Truckers short of drivers and perplexed by uneven orders that make long-term planning nearly impossible.

The nation’s supply chain, once a humming model of efficiency, has turned into an expensive, unreliable mix of COVID-related delays and inefficiencies worsen in the peak freight season.

It’s even gotten the attention of the White House. Recently President Joe Biden issued an executive order, simply entitled “America's Supply Chains” to look into the problem.

Biden named a former top Obama administration official, John Porcari, as “ports envoy” to look into the issue. Porcari, a former deputy Department of Transportation official and ex-Maryland Transportation Secretary, immediately made an impact by pushing the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles into adding night and weekend hours to aid truckers in easing port congestion and the container shortages.

But shippers are growing anxious in peak freight season ahead of the expected crush of Christmas.

“It takes time to unwind that kind of congestion and we don’t have time,” Stephen Lamar, president of the American Apparel and Footwear Association, told the Washington Post. “These are the kind of actions that should have been taken months ago. This needs to be treated as the crisis that it is.”

Toward that end, the president’s order empowers several federal agency actions to secure and strengthen America's supply chains. He’s even invited shippers and anyone else to comment on the problem.

On Sept. 16, the Department of Transportation published in the Federal Register a request for information seeking input toward practical solutions to address “current and future challenges” to supply chain resilience in the freight and logistics sector.

This followed the June 8 announcement of the establishment of a “Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force”—co-chaired by the Secretaries of Transportation, Agriculture, and Commerce—to address near-term supply chain challenges.

The hope is to ease bottlenecks and supply constraints in the transport sector, particularly for ports, rail, and trucking.

If it’s any consolation—and it likely won’t be—the issue is not confined to North America. Recently, Britain suffered shortages of petrol as its fuel truck drivers felt the pinch of rising prices and more complicated visa requirements as a result of its exit from the European union.

Supply chain woes have the attention of the Federal Reserve. Recently, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell cited factory shutdowns and shipping problems in helping weigh down economic growth and push inflation above the Fed’s goal of 2 percent annually.

“It is … frustrating to see the bottlenecks and supply chain problems not getting better – in fact, at the margin, apparently getting a little bit worse,” Powell said recently at a conference with his colleagues from the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and Bank of Japan. We see that continuing into next year, probably, and holding inflation up longer than we had thought.”

Under Biden’s executive order, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is ordered to submit within a year a report to the president on supply chain improvements for the transportation industrial base.

DOT's one-year assessment will build off the work of the Supply Chains Disruption Task Force and focus on the freight and logistics sectors.

Comments must be received on or before Oct, 18, 2021.  For further information, including instructions on submitting comments to the docket, click here.