Transcript: Secretary Buttigieg Remarks to the NDTA-USTRANSCOM Fall Meeting

Hello, I’m Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. I want to thank Vice Admiral Brown for inviting me to speak with you today, as well as everyone at NDTA and U.S. Transportation Command for making this event possible. 

I also want to extend my thanks and congratulations to the newly minted Commander of USTRANSCOM: General Jacqueline Van Ovost. General, your remarkable service and leadership are an inspiration to many, and I’m eager to work with you in the years ahead. 

I also want to say that across every mode of transportation – sea, air, rail, freight, and more – we must do more as a country to engage the talented leadership of women, which includes ensuring equal respect and representation in leadership positions. General Van Ovost’s leadership is a powerful example – for servicemembers and civilians alike. 

I want to thank Vice Admiral Mewbourne for his devoted and important work as Deputy Commander of TRANSCOM, and most recently, for the role he played in Operation Allies Welcome. 

We at USDOT are also proud of the President’s nominee to lead the Maritime Administration, Rear Admiral Ann Phillips.

In recent months, we have seen what our transportation system can do to rise to any occasion. 

When America needed to evacuate our citizens and our allies from Afghanistan, our Department partnered with DOD to support the activation of the Civilian Reserve Air Fleet to transport evacuees. 

In a time of crisis, we needed both the military aircraft that went into Kabul and the US civilian aviation sector – including the airlines, their extraordinarily dedicated crews, and the airport leadership and ground handlers. Together, they worked with DOD to transport evacuees from the so called “lilypads” to Washington and Philadelphia, making Operation Allies Welcome possible. 

Of course, our transportation industry has also spent 20 long months dealing with another crisis: the pandemic. 

Our maritime industry and airlines shipped vital medical equipment from overseas to the first responders who needed it here. Our rail carriers and trucking industry distributed hundreds of millions of doses of lifesaving vaccines around the country. And our workers – from merchant mariners and longshore workers to truckers and terminal operators – supported all those efforts, often in dangerous conditions, even while losing friends and coworkers along the way. 

Until the past year and a half, most Americans didn’t spend much time thinking about how goods got to store shelves or into their homes. But now we’re facing global supply chain issues that are years, if not decades, in the making. 

In some ways, this global problem has its roots in the continuing economic recovery. We’ve seen sales and demand roar back faster than most companies dared to imagine. And that reflects successful policies to add jobs and restore income for Americans – but it comes with huge challenges for our goods movement chains straining to catch up. 

While the pandemic may have supercharged these issues, the bottom line is this: Our shipping and freight infrastructure were built at a time when no one imagined a world in which anyone could order anything from anywhere with the flick of a thumb on a smartphone. 

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

But in the short term, we are acting to help address the bottlenecks that we see at every stage of the supply chain, all around the world. Getting goods from ships into ports, from ports onto trains and trucks, and from there to shelves and homes.  

And of course, these different pieces of the supply chain are owned by different private industry players that historically haven’t always talked to each other. That’s why forums like this one are so important. We need to cultivate environments and occasions where all the stakeholders can come together to confront problems. 

And that’s exactly what we’ve been trying to do at DOT – convene stakeholders and serve as an honest broker. At the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach – which together handle some 40% of the containerized cargo that enters our country – we helped secure an agreement to expand hours of operation to 24/7, with support from ports, industry partners, and labor unions. 

And that’s just one part of the puzzle. The country is counting on us to take unprecedented action at every link in the supply chain, including opening up more shifts, and moving toward a 24/7 system.  

To speed the handoff from ports to trucks, we convened the trucking industry, and are working with the Department of Labor to expand apprenticeships that get more drivers into the business, and help keep them there, while our Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration works with states to cut the red tape and help issue more CDLs. 

And just last week, I met at the White House with CEOs from some of the biggest retailers and ground shipping companies, including companies that I’m sure are represented at this event today. They made important commitments to help accelerate the process of moving their freight out of ports – taking advantage of those expanded operating hours – to make room for more incoming cargo, especially from small- and medium-sized businesses. 

These are commendable first step, and we hope more will follow across industry. I strongly encourage those industries represented here today to look at ways at improving the throughput of our network by increasing operating hours and sharing more information to make the systems more interoperable.

At the end of the day though, this is inseparable from the generational issue of underinvestment in the infrastructure that we count on to move goods throughout our economy. 

Which brings me back to the President’s historic, bipartisan infrastructure deal. 

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act would help us expand port capacity; improve multimodal connections among ports, trains, and trucks; and rebuild the rails, roads, bridges, and waterways that they travel on. 

It invests over a $100 billion in roads, bridges, and highways, to help fix infrastructure that’s been neglected for years and even decades—much of which is deteriorating as we speak. 

It includes $66 billion for passenger and freight rail, so we can create and improve multimodal rail hubs and move goods and people seamlessly across this country. 

It contains another $25 billion for airports, to address repair backlogs and reduce congestion, while also enabling better multimodal connections.

And of course, it invests $17 billion in our ports and waterways, including $2.25 billion for the Port Infrastructure Development Program. It’s roughly the same amount of funding for ports as all DOT-administered grant programs over the past decade combined. 

That investment would help build new wharfs where ships can dock and unload cargo, improve rail connections to docks, and install new, safer, modern equipment to move containers. 

Crucially, these investments in our ports, along with other investments in the plan, will also help us to ensure that our supply chains are not just stronger, but cleaner and more resilient than ever before.

And we envision the goods and materials for these infrastructure investments made in America, shipped on U.S.-flag, U.S.-crewed vessels, reflecting this President’s commitment to Buy America and to the Jones Act.

Before I close, I want to address something just as important as our physical infrastructure: and that is our people. 

Our current challenges and opportunities aren’t just about ships, trucks, and trains – they’re about engineers, drivers, and mariners. We need to make sure we are supporting good working conditions, competitive pay, and excellent training and career development for people at every level and in every part of our transportation systems. 

It’s also one more reason why gender equity matters. 

We cannot remain the leading power in the world if are only drawing from the brilliance, experience, and courage of half our people. And we can’t expect other countries to heed our calls for human rights if we don’t lead by example here.  

You’ll continue to hear me speak a great deal about the human factor in our transportation and logistics industries. And today I want to make clear a particular focus that requires our immediate attention.
 
For far too long, sexual assault in the maritime shipping industry has been an open secret, affecting the industry as a whole, and the U.S. Merchant Marine in particular. 

So, I want to directly address reports we’ve seen recently about sexual assault impacting the U.S. Merchant Marine. It’s critical – but not enough – for a company, agency, or government to say that there is zero tolerance for harassment and assault. It’s critical – but not enough – to say that allegations are taken seriously, or to point to training and reporting systems that are in place. 

This commitment must be matched by concrete, deliberate action. That means tearing down any and all barriers that prevent survivors from reporting these incidents. It means holding perpetrators accountable. And most important of all, it means preventing assault and harassment from happening in the first place. 

That’s not just a matter of policy, it’s a matter of culture.  

I’m raising it with this audience because I know that much of the leadership that can help to drive that culture change is right here at this convening.

All of us – government, military, and private sector – have an obligation to work together to usher in that change. 

If we are to maintain the greatest transportation system in the world, men and women in the U.S. Merchant Marine – and in the maritime industry writ large – must be safe and respected, from their first day at an academy or in any training or apprentice program and throughout their entire careers, afloat and ashore.  

We count on our mariners and the people of our transportation and logistics industries today, more than ever. Which means we must support these Americans – as workers, and as people. 

It’s a moral imperative, a national security imperative, and an economic imperative. Especially at a time when it is so profoundly important to our future that we effectively recruit and support the people who represent the next generation of the merchant marine and the rest of our transportation leadership.

The ability to move goods, people, and material across the country is fundamentally important to our economy. The right investments, in our infrastructure and in our people, will lay the groundwork for a generation of renewed economic prosperity, so that every user, of every part, of every one of our transportation systems – commercial, military, and civilian – can travel quickly and safely. 

I’m looking forward to working with all of you to unlock the full potential of these historic investments, and create a transportation system that supports our economy and our national security for generations to come. 

Thank you.