Transcript: Secretary Buttigieg Remarks to the Association of Pacific Ports Annual Conference

Thank you to the Association of Pacific Ports for inviting me to share some words. 

I wish I could have joined you in person, but I look forward to meeting another time soon – and today you’ll be well-served by appearances from my Maritime Administration colleagues who are in attendance. 

This is your 107th annual conference, and while your work is vital and challenging every year, it feels like this time the whole world is recognizing the significance of Pacific ports as never before.

Certainly, these last 20 months have been extraordinary. Under the hardest circumstances, you have literally helped to keep America’s economy afloat.   

So, I want to say thank you, to you and everyone who works to keep our ports running.   

Right now, we are dealing with the economic consequences of the pandemic – including disruptions in supply chains around the globe.  

As you are aware, more than anybody, sales and demand have roared back faster than most companies dared to imagine when making their plans. That reflects successful policies to add jobs and restore income for Americans – but it brings huge challenges as our goods movement chains are straining to catch up. 

Additionally, some of the ports and factories we rely on abroad have had shutdowns because of COVID outbreaks, which means that some of the goods that American families and businesses expect aren’t arriving on the timelines that were expected. 

While the pandemic may have supercharged our supply chain issues, the truth is this: our shipping and freight infrastructure is decades or even more than a century old in some cases, and is not built for today’s volumes, speeds, or expectations.   

That’s why, for the long-term, this is one more piece of evidence that we urgently need bold, federal investment in our infrastructure – including our ports, freight rail, and intermodal facilities. 

The President’s bipartisan infrastructure deal would invest $17 billion in our ports and waterways, including $2.25 billion in the Port Infrastructure Development Program. That’s roughly the same amount of funding for ports as all DOT-administered grant programs over the past decade combined. 

But infrastructure investments like these can’t solve these short term challenges overnight, so in the meantime, we are acting to address the bottlenecks that we see at every step of the supply chain – each piece of which is owned by different private industries. 

At the DOT, we have been convening stakeholders and working to serve as an honest broker. At the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, we have helped secure an agreement to move hours of operation to 24/7, with backing from the two ports, industry partners, and labor unions. 

We’re very grateful for their leadership. And we’re already seeing encouraging signs. In the last week, at the Port of LA the percentage of cargo waiting on the docks for 13 days or more dropped from 25% to 6%. 

It’s an important part of the puzzle – necessary but not sufficient. The country is counting on us to take unprecedented action across every link in the supply chain.   

Earlier this month, I met at the White House with CEOs from some of the biggest retailers and ground shipping companies. They made commitments to accelerate the process of moving their freight out of ports – taking advantage of those expanded operating hours.  

These important first steps should signal the direction that things are headed. In the days since, we’ve also been glad to see Union Pacific freight rail expanding to 24/7 at their San Pedro Bay facility.   

I want to encourage more ports and businesses represented here today to look for ways to improve throughput by increasing operating hours and sharing more data and information to make the systems more interoperable.  

My Department wants to work with you to make that happen, and to make that easier, so let us connect if we’re not already in touch. 

I’ll end by reflecting on what Association of Pacific Ports President King-Hinds wrote in a letter to attendees of this conference.   

She noted the importance of working together to rise to the occasion in this moment of global disruption and encouraged collaboration as one community across industries and geographies.  

That is a message that our Department and entire Administration want to echo. I’m looking forward to our continued collaboration as we meet this moment and build back better. 

Thank you and have a great conference.