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Dive Brief:
- The Biden administration launched an Office of Multimodal Freight Infrastructure and Policy within the Department of Transportation to help maintain and improve national supply chains, the White House was announced Monday.
- The office, created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, received $2 million in funding for fiscal year 2023. President Biden’s budget for fiscal year 2024 calls for $7.3 million for the office, a spokesperson told Trucking Dive US Department of Transportation.
- Alison Dane Camden, a former Washington Department of Transportation official, will lead the office as deputy assistant secretary for infrastructure and multimodal freight policy. The office will develop a National Multimodal Freight Network, review state freight plans and advance the Freight Logistics Optimization Works program with the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Dive Insight:
The start of the office was between several White House announcements related to the supply chain which took place on Cyber Monday, with public attention focused on supply chains during the biggest online shopping day of the year.
Hiring for the new office is underway, although the number of staff has not yet been finalized, according to the DOT spokesperson.
Camden was deputy assistant secretary for multimodal development and delivery at Washington State DOT, leading a team of 800 employees in 11 departments, before serving as director of external affairs, according to an online resume. He spent a decade on Capitol Hill as a policy advisor to three members of Congress.
The new government arm represents an extension and expansion of the work that began with Biden’s creation of a port envoy role in 2021, in which the president appointed John Porcari amid great disturbance in the harbor. The role’s remit was expanded to include supply chains when retired General Stephen Lyons; took up the post last year.
Porcari called the opening of the office a “landmark” in a phone interview with Trucking Dive Monday.
“After the initial firefighting and response, you need to build capacity to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and if it does, we can respond quickly and comprehensively.”
John Porcari
Advisor to the US Department of Transportation, former port envoy
The former Maryland transportation secretary, who now informally advises the federal DOT, described the dispatcher’s role as a “triage” position that mostly involved “working to deal with a crisis that had already unfolded.”
“I was happy to be the first responder,” he said. “But after the initial firefighting and response, you have to build capacity to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and if it does, we can respond quickly and comprehensively.”
Dedicating an office to continuing work on the FLOW initiative and aligning a patchwork of disparate state freight plans will help keep the work a priority, Porcari said.
“It puts the movement of goods on an equal footing with the movement of people in transport,” he said. “It is literally the lifeblood of our economy. It is not just a matter of national economic performance. It’s a matter of national security.”
It was also personally gratifying, Porcari said, to see what he called “muscle memory” of the lessons learned from dealing with the pandemic built into a permanent government capacity.
“On a macro scale, it’s a national competitive advantage for the U.S. if we get it right,” he said.