A Look Back at Biden’s Supply Chain Legacy

When Joe Biden was sworn into office in January of 2021, the U.S. was still in the throes of a pandemic that had laid bare the weaknesses of the country’s supply chains. Grocery stores had struggled to stock items as basic as toilet paper, auto manufacturers halted production lines, and crucial protective equipment was slow to reach hospitals on the front lines of the crisis. Over the next four years, much of Biden’s presidency was centered around efforts to ensure that should another crisis hit, supply lines would continue moving. 

“The pandemic changed quite a bit,” says Vinny Licata, the head of logistics at global manufacturing company Fictiv. “I think everybody realized the vulnerability of the supply chain.” 

Within Biden’s first year as president, he expanded the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to 24/7 operations to manage growing backlogs of cargo, worked with companies like Walmart and Target to increase the number of containers they were moving out of ports at night, and appointed a port envoy to help coordinate efforts among operators and firms across the country’s major shipping hubs. A year later, the U.S. Department of Transportation launched the Freight Logistics Optimization Works (FLOW) program, designed to aggregate data shared by ocean carriers, ports and railways, and then use that to predict future bottlenecks and manage supplies accordingly. Today, FLOW has 86 participants, including nine of the largest container ports in the country, and 10 of the largest U.S. importers.

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