When Joe Biden was sworn into office in January of 2021, the U.S. was still in the throes of a pandemic that had laid bare the weaknesses of the country's supply chains. Grocery stores had struggled to stock items as basic as toilet paper, auto manufacturers halted production lines, and crucial protective equipment was slow to reach hospitals on the front lines of the crisis. Over the next four years, much of Biden's presidency was centered around efforts to ensure that should another crisis hit, supply lines would continue moving. 

"The pandemic changed quite a bit," says Vinny Licata, the head of logistics at global manufacturing company Fictiv. "I think everybody realized the vulnerability of the supply chain." 

Within Biden's first year as president, he paved the way for expansion at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to 24/7 operations to manage growing backlogs of cargo, worked with companies like Walmart and Target to increase the number of containers they were moving out of ports at night, and appointed a port envoy to help coordinate efforts among operators and firms across the country's major shipping hubs. A year later, the U.S. Department of Transportation launched the Freight Logistics Optimization Works (FLOW) program, designed to aggregate data shared by ocean carriers, ports and railways, and then use that to predict future bottlenecks and manage supplies accordingly. Today, FLOW has 86 participants, including nine of the largest container ports in the country, and 10 of the largest U.S. importers.

Funding Infrastructure

Biden also scored a trio of legislative victories, marked by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021, the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, and the CHIPS Act in that same year. Combined, those three bills have led to billions in funding for port improvement projects, long-needed repairs and upgrades to roads and railways, a slew of green fuel initiatives, and domestic manufacturing for semiconductors and battery materials. 

"There's investment in roads, there's investment in ports, we've been lacking that in past years," Licata says. He also notes that the future of those investments  — many of which include money for projects years down the road — will depend on the incoming Trump administration, with nearly $300 billion left in funding to distribute from the Infrastructure Act alone. There may also be some growing pains in the transition between Biden and Trump, according to the Brookings Institute, an economic think tank based out of Washington, D.C. As the institute points out, Trump's administration will need to nominate new staff who will have to quickly learn the complex mechanisms behind the management and distribution of the remaining funds. 

"That won’t be a light lift," said Brookings senior fellow Adie Tomer and research assistant Ben Swedberg in a November 2024 blog post. "If they want to keep the same general schedule as the Biden administration, agencies will likely need to issue more than 10 notices of funding opportunities just in the administration’s first three months. If they fail to do so, a backlog could start building." 

Addressing Forced Labor 

Biden also presided over the passage of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) in 2021, which sought to curb the flow of imports from China's controversial Xinjiang region, reputed for its use of ethnic and religious minorities for forced labor. And although the bill has led to U.S. Customs and Border Protection turning away billions of dollars worth of goods produced in the region, Xinjiang continues to operate as one of the world's largest systems of state-imposed forced labor. 

"(The UFLPA) was not effective, and it did very little to change the realities of Chinese living in Xinjiang," says Ram Ben Tzion, the CEO and co-founder of Publican, which uses an artificial intelligence platform to vet freight shipments by cross-checking data across numerous sources. 

Read More: How China Might Get Around the U.S. Ban on Imports Made With Forced Labor

According to a February 2024 report from defense think tank the Jamestown Foundation, forced labor transfers of Uyghur Muslims in 2023 actually exceeded the previous year's total, surpassing the quota mandated by the region's semi-autonomous XUAR government by nearly 11%. The foundation also warned that recent policy changes in Xinjiang have sought to make forced labor less visible to the rest of the world, which has made the practice "more prevalent and more insidious." Ultimately, Ben Tzion believes that the UFLPA is far too short on enforcement measures, describing it as "more of a statement than a trade policy." 

As for all presidents, it will likely take years before we can fully understand the lasting impacts of Biden's time in office. And with the incoming administration already taking a hard stance on tariffs and trade wars, U.S. supply chains could soon face a whole new set of challenges that would immediately put the lessons of the last four years to the test. 

"We have to continue working with all these countries to make sure that we can still have a global supply chain," Licata says. "I think both sides of the aisle are trying to do the right things for the country, and I don't think it's necessarily about policy, but about how we execute that policy as we go forward."