As a means to protect the U.S. supply chain, the inaugural meeting of the White House Council on Supply Chain Resilience recently saw the announcement of a new Supply Chain Resilience Center (SCRC) to analyze vulnerabilities and collaborate with the private sector.
Primarily, the new governmental entity will examine security at U.S. port infrastructure, then provide recommendations to the private sector by early 2024. This will include scenario planning with stakeholders focused on countering supply chain disruptions, lowering costs and guaranteeing reliability of deliveries. Items like semiconductors will take priority, as the government works to identify how it can ensure strategically valuable infrastructure owners and operators can keep goods and services flowing to the U.S. disruptions or shortages, like those seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Securing our critical infrastructure is fundamental to staying competitive in a 21st-century economy, and the Department of Homeland Security’s new Supply Chain Resilience Center will enhance our efforts to do just that,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said. “The global pandemic has revealed that the supply chains that Americans rely upon for food and essential other goods must be more robust and resilient. Conflict, political instability, and climate change could challenge our supply chains in the years ahead. The Supply Chain Resilience Center will help American businesses and the federal government anticipate these disruptions and play a key role in the Biden-Harris Administration’s work to prevent them.”
Among the actionable items to be considered by the group will be adversarial nation state threats, overreliance on untrustworthy equipment subject to nation-state control, data extraction, insider risk and unvetted virtual and physical access. Future work will also include looks at reservation systems, logistics management platforms and data production. From there, SCRC will host at least two tabletop exercises next year to test the resilience of critical cross-border supply chains alongside other U.S. federal agencies, foreign governments and industry partners.