What they’re saying: On May 27th, the Department of Transportation announced that Retired General Stephen R. Lyons, will be the new Port and Supply Chain Envoy to the Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force. Retired General Lyons will work with the DOT, the White House National Economic Council (NEC), ports, rail, trucking, and other private companies across our supply chains to continue to address bottlenecks and speed up the movement of goods.
The Task Force has worked with ports to propose a container dwell fee to reduce congestion at the ports. It has funded pop-up container yards to get goods from ships to shelves faster while supporting agricultural exporters.
Together, these actions are leading to progress.
- Long-dwelling containers at the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach have dropped by about 50 percent since the proposed fee.
- The total number of container ships waiting to enter U.S. ports has dropped by nearly 50% since peaking in early February. Both the Ports of LA and Long Beach had record months in April in terms of container throughput.
- In addition, 2021 was the best trucking employment year since 1994.
- Goods are successfully being delivered to shelves and inventories excluding autos are at their highest levels in history.
- Further, the DOT has put out historic investments in the tens of billions to upgrade our aging infrastructure.