White House Supply Chain Initiative

President Biden presided over the first meeting of his newly-created Council on Supply Chain Resilience, formed to prevent the shortages in medical and consumer products that took place during the global pandemic. 

His Administration’s efforts to strengthen US supply chains also means more domestic manufacturing and less reliance on imports, the President said.

“Today, our supply chains are stronger than ever, with backlogs, bottlenecks, and shipping rates at a 25-year low,” he said. “We've created 14 million new jobs, including 800,000 manufacturing jobs.”

The council is charged with ensuring that US supply chains “remain secure, diversified, resilient,” the President continued. In addition, an early warning system is being created to spot supply chain risks.

The President said he will be invoking the Defense Production Act to boost domestic production of essential medicines.  

He also pointed to the recently-completed supply chain agreement under the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. “This agreement is going to help us identify supply chain bottlenecks before they become the kind of full-scale disruptions we saw during the pandemic.”

Initiatives

Some of the key initiatives announced by the President include:

• The creation of the Council on Supply Chain Resilience. The Council will be co-chaired by the National Security Advisor and National Economic Advisor, and include the Secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, the Interior, Labor, State, Transportation, the Treasury, and Veterans Affairs; the Attorney General; the Administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Small Business Administration; the Directors of National Intelligence, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy; the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers; the US Trade Representative; and other senior officials from the Executive Office of the President and other agencies.
• Use of the Defense Production Act to make more essential medicines in America and mitigate drug shortages. President Biden will issue a Presidential Determination to broaden the Department of Health and Human Services’ authorities under Title III of the Defense Production Act to enable investment in domestic manufacturing of essential medicines, medical countermeasures, and critical inputs that have been deemed by the President as essential to the national defense.
• HHS has identified $35 million for investments in domestic production of key starting materials for sterile injectable medicines. HHS will also designate a new Supply Chain Resilience and Shortage Coordinator for efforts to strengthen the resilience of medical product and critical food supply chains, and to address related shortages. HHS intends to institutionalize this coordination to advance the department’s supply chain resilience and shortage mitigation goals over the long term. The Department of Defense will soon release a new report on pharmaceutical supply chain resilience aimed at reducing reliance on high-risk foreign suppliers.

The Administration has developed several cross-government partnerships to improve supply chain monitoring and strategy, including:

The Department of Commerce’s Supply Chain Center is integrating industry expertise and data analytics 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 to conduct deep-dive analyses on clean energy supply.

Additionally, Commerce is partnering with HHS to assess industry and import data that can help address foreign dependency vulnerabilities and points of failure for critical drugs.