Report Card: Two Years of Building Stronger Supply Chains and a More Resilient Economy

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic crisis significantly disrupted supply chains around the world, forcing many families to navigate empty store shelves, endure longer delivery times, and pay higher prices at the register. Supply chain bottlenecks for critical inputs, like semiconductors, exposed major U.S. economic and national security vulnerabilities, many of which were decades in the making. Pandemic-induced disruptions were exacerbated by Russia's unjust invasion of Ukraine, which further highlighted the dangers of overreliance on geographically concentrated production and far-flung, fragile supply chains. Together, the pandemic and the war contributed to a surge in input costs and inflation across many sectors of the economy.

The Biden-Harris Administration made supply chain resilience and response a top priority on day one, collaborating with industry and labor to address acute shortages and bottlenecks throughout the economy. As a result, critical supply chains are significantly more fluid and resilient than they were when the President took office. Today, we see increased access to transportation and warehousing capacity and equipment, solid throughput at the ports, improved delivery times, greater ocean shipping reliability, and steady declines in transportation costs.

• The nation's ports moved record levels of cargo in 2021 (25.8 million units) and 2022 (25.5 million units) through increased collaboration across the logistics industry, which has helped reduce the significant backlog of anchored vessels from a peak of 155 to roughly a dozen in May 2023.

• 92 percent of goods at grocery and drug stores are in stock—above where they were pre-pandemic.

• There are over 120 new trucking firms with Registered Apprenticeship programs to help attract, train, and retain talent in this critical sector.

• The New York Fed's Global Supply Chain Pressure Index has eased off of its highest level on record. This has happened alongside a historic surge in East-West ocean shipping prices, which have fallen by roughly 90 percent since their peak in September 2021, as well as a 30 percent drop in gas prices since their summer 2022 peak. Moreover, annual core goods inflation has fallen more than 65 percent since its peak in February 2022.

Today, the White House Council of Economic Advisers released a blog demonstrating that the normalization of supply chains appears to be driving down prices for goods, lowering inflation for families, consumers, and businesses.

Even with this success, President Biden has long recognized that building strong supply chains requires not just solving acute crises but making long-term investments in resilience. In his first months in office, President Biden signed Executive Order (E.O.) 14017, "America's Supply Chains," directing the federal government to undertake a first-of-its-kind comprehensive 100-day review of the supply chains of four critical products – semiconductors, large capacity batteries, critical minerals and materials, and pharmaceuticals and active pharmaceutical ingredients – to identify vulnerabilities, assess risks, and develop strategies to promote resilience.

To undertake this comprehensive review, the Biden Administration established an internal task force spanning more than a dozen agencies, consulting with hundreds of stakeholders from labor, business, academic institutions, Congress, and U.S. allies and partners to identify vulnerabilities and solutions for these supply chains. The 100-day review was released on June 8, 2021.

Two years later, significant progress has been made in implementing the 100-day review's findings. More than 70 recommendations across the report have been completed to date – from providing financing across the full battery supply chain to leveraging the Defense Production Act in historic ways to diversifying supply chains by supporting small- and medium-sized businesses. Spurred by President Biden's Investing in America agenda, the private sector has invested over $470 billion in manufacturing of semiconductors, electric vehicles (EVs) and EV batteries, clean energy technologies, and pharmaceutical and medical products.

The following report card lays out actions taken across more than two dozen of the most significant cross-cutting recommendations in the 100-day review, strengthening critical supply chains while creating good-paying, union jobs, and bolstering our industrial base and domestic manufacturing capacity.

To read the full report, visit: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Supply-Chain-Report-Card.pdf