White House Announces Moves to Unkink West Coast Supply Chain Knots

Biden said those corporate commitments matter. "This is a big first step," he said at the White House. "Now we need the rest of the private sector supply chain to step up as well."

Previously, the Port of Long Beach had extended hours after 3 a.m. weekdays, but The Wall Street Journal reported that no truckers had signed up for any of the slots in the first two weeks after the change. The drayage companies said the rules on what kind of containers they were dropping off were onerous, and the port officials said more big companies needed to choose to schedule in those early morning hours.

Biden acknowledged that it's not just the ports that have to operate 24/7 to clear the backlog of ships at those busy ports, but also railyards and warehouses. "If the private sector doesn't step up, we're going to call them out and ask them to act," he said.

Before Biden's remarks, he met virtually with corporate CEOs, labor leaders, port officials and other supply chain players. "They discussed additional solutions to alleviate congestion and improve efficiency. This included a temporary expansion of warehousing and rail service, improving data tools and data sharing at the ports, and increasing ... recruitment of truck drivers while improving the quality of trucking jobs. They discussed the importance of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Build Back Better legislation, which would make a generational investment in our workers, our infrastructure, and our supply chains and create a more resilient and globally competitive goods movement system in the U.S.," the readout of the virtual gathering said.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill offers $17 billion over 10 years for ports, but it has not been able to pass the House since progressives will only vote for it once they have confidence that social spending will follow.

In a press call ahead of the announcement, officials also noted that the investments are going to be the real solution. "To be clear, no matter what we do in the short term, we ultimately have an issue of capacity of our ports, our freight rail, our roads and bridges. Put simply, much of the shipping and freight infrastructure was built decades or even generations ago, and Americans are importing and exporting far more than we did back then," an official said on a background call.

"We’re helping to address the truck driver shortage by supporting state DMVs as they return to or even exceed what were their pre-pandemic commercial driver’s license issuance rates. In 2021, an average of 50,000 commercial driver’s licenses and learner’s permits have been issued each month -- 60 percent higher than the 2020 numbers," an official said.

A reporter on that call said that between Long Beach and LA, there were 62 ships docked and 81 at anchor waiting to unload, and asked what success would look like. The official did not say a particular size of backup, but said there are already some improvements, and that the corporate commitments would help significantly.

FedEx said they expect to be able to double the number of containers they move at night; Target said it's already moving 50% of its containers at night, but will increase that to 60%. Walmart said it could double the amount of product it's moving from Southern California ports because of the extended hours; Samsung said it will increase its product movement by 60% because of the expanded hours. Walmart had previously said that it had chartered its own ships and routed shipments through less busy ports to deal with the delays.