Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Port Envoy to the White House Supply Chain Task Force John Porcari, January 5, 2022
James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
MS. PSAKI: Hi, everyone. Okay. So, today, we have another great guest to kick off the new year — our first guest in the new year: John Porcari, who is the former Deputy Secretary of Transportation and currently the Port Envoy to the White House Supply Chain Task Force. He’s going to give some brief remarks. He’ll be able to take just a couple of questions.
I’ll just note at the top: I have a hard stop at about five of one, so we’ll try to get around to everybody in the room as well.
With that, I’ll turn it over to you.
MR. PORCARI: Thanks, Jen. Hi, everyone. It’s a real pleasure to be here. I’d like to give you an update on the work we’ve done as part of the Biden-Harris Supply Chain Task Force. But first, I’d like to give you a quick look back at how we got here.
The President saw early on how the pandemic was putting our supply chains to the test. In February, he issued an executive order requiring agencies to produce reports identifying challenges in our supply chains for a set of critical products and for a set of critical industries.
When the first reports were released in June, he created the Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force at the Cabinet level to use every government lever to address the near-term disruptions related to the pandemic. One area he asked the task force to focus on was ports and trucking.
In July, Secretary Buttigieg convened all of the key players from the goods movement supply chain: ports, labor, trucking, businesses, and more.
In August, I joined the
