Supply Chain Tracing, Multimodal Logistics Part of WH Supply Chain Initiative

An administration Council on Supply Chain Resilience, which includes the head of every Cabinet-level agency except the Education Department, held its first meeting, with the goal of maintaining resilient supply chains.

At a press conference announcing the effort, President Joe Biden said, "Did you ever think we'd be talking this much about supply chains? Before the pandemic, supply chains weren't something most Americans knew about or talked about."

Biden said a drop in prices of major appliances of 9% compared with two years ago is because of the work the administration already did to unkink supply chain snarls, including, he said, "cracking down on foreign-owned shipping companies that had raised their prices as much as 1000% while racking up record profits."

The council will do a supply chain review every four years, with the first due Dec. 31, 2024. That review aims to update criteria of sectors and products that are critical to economic security.

The White House put out a fact sheet that described how various departments will contribute to the supply chain support efforts.

DHS is opening a Supply Chain Resilience Center to address vulnerabilities at U.S. ports and to run tabletop exercises to test critical international supply chains. The Transportation Department is opening a Multimodal Freight Infrastructure and Policy Office, which will aim to improve the condition of the multimodal freight network, in part by reviewing state freight plans. The office will also manage the FLOW initiative (Freight Logistics Optimization Works), a logistics coordination effort that began when port congestion, full warehouses and chassis shortages were hurting exports and slowing down imports' movement across the country.

The Commerce Department will hold a Supply Chain Data and Analytics Summit in 2024 with private sector representatives and public stakeholders to get input into supply chain risk assessment models and tools, and to consider action to improve data availability.

It already is listening to industry "to develop innovative supply chain risk assessment tools, and is coordinating deep-dive analyses on select critical supply chains to drive targeted actions to increase resilience. This Center is building broad partnerships across government, industry, and academia, including collaborating with the Department of Energy (DOE) to conduct deep-dive analyses on clean energy supply," the fact sheet said. The U.S. Geological Survey, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) also are hosting hackathons, with the first one in February, to develop artificial intelligence tools to assess domestic critical minerals resources.

The Department of Labor is providing $8 million in grants for two organizations to identify supply chain traceability and technology to address forced labor risk and child labor risk, the administration said, pointing specifically to cotton and cobalt. The Labor Department will research mineral and agricultural supply chains in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the release said.