President Joe Biden on Monday convened the first meeting of his new Supply Chain Resilience Council, which announced 30 actions to strengthen logistics across the country.
What You Need To Know
- President Joe Biden announced a series of measures to strengthen domestic and global supply chains
- The action comes after pandemic-era supply chain snags contributed to several years of high inflation
- A large portion of the actions address domestic renewable energy supply chains
The action comes after supply chain snags fueled inflation in 2021 as the country was struggling to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. Energy prices have fallen 4.5 percent in the last year, according to the Consumer Price Index, but still contribute to overall inflation, which could pose a political challenge for Biden heading into the 2024 presidential election.
Among the 30 actions to strengthen supply chains, at least 11 deal specifically with the domestic supply of renewable energy.
The federal government will improve its ability to monitor energy resources and share data across agencies.
The government is also investing $275 million in communities affected by coal mine or coal power plant closures—to create new clean energy supply chains. The measure builds on clean energy manufacturing initiatives in places like New Albany and Akron, Ohio, where federal grants are supporting new semiconductor plants. Semiconductors are used in many electronic devices, including solar panels and electric vehicles.
“This agreement can help us identify supply chain bottlenecks before they become the kind of full-scale disruptions that we saw during the pandemic. We all saw what happened then: semi-conductor supply chains from Asia to America shut down,” President Biden said at a press conference announcing the supply chain measures.
Officials have warned, however, that in order to build more semiconductors, the U.S. relies heavily on imports of rare earth elements from China.
According to data from the U.S. Geological Survey, China supplies 100% of the U.S.’s supply of the minerals gallium and graphite, and 50% of the country’s supply of germanium. All three minerals are used in clean energy technologies.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee last week published a letter stating China has begun cutting off American access to some of those elements, such as the critical minerals gallium, germanium and phosphate, adding, “These adversarial actions by China pose a direct threat to our national security and to our energy security.”
Ohio Rep. Bill Johnson has also voiced concern that federal rules to speed up the transition to green energy could further strain energy supply chains.
“EPA rulemakings pose a very real threat to the affordability and reliability of our electric grid. We continue to hear from state's utilities and grid operators that the grid is facing reliability issues,” Johnson said at a hearing earlier this month.
Biden administration officials said transitioning to domestic clean energy was the only way to ensure the electric grid is reliable in the long term.
“We need to be less reliant on volatile energy prices, particularly when most of the energy supply as it is, doesn’t come from the United States, but comes from around the world,” said Daniel Hornung, deputy director of the National Economic Council.
The supply chain improvements announced by Biden also include addressing areas like freight logistics, the domestic food supply and access to critical medicines.