Experts: U.S. ports lag global peers; committee urged to adopt a national port strategy and embrace automation

A panel of witnesses told the Joint Economic Committee that the United States has ceded much of its maritime commercial advantage and that ports and related logistics infrastructure require a coordinated national strategy to support any major reshoring of manufacturing.

Why it matters: Ports are the arrival and departure points for most containerized trade. Witnesses said capacity constraints, growing ship sizes, trade imbalances and labor practices together make U.S. ports slower and less productive than many foreign competitors — a bottleneck for supply‑chain resilience.

Yossi Sheffi opened his remarks bluntly: “The United States is no longer a commercial maritime power,” he said, and then listed six barriers to U.S. port logistics: rising container volumes, scale and ship size, the composition of traffic (imports vs. exports), imbalances that send empty boxes back to sea, labor‑technology tensions and low time‑handling efficiency. He told the committee U.S. ports are “about 30% less efficient than the global average” in ship turnaround time and that many foreign ports are far faster.

Sheffi cited the expansion of the Panama Canal and the growing size of container ships as a structural challenge: most very large ships cannot call at many East Coast ports, so the public owners of port facilities must shoulder costly infrastructure upgrades that primarily benefit privately owned shipping lines.

Panelists and members discussed the role of logistics clusters. Sheffi and other witnesses pointed to Memphis as an example of an effective intermodal cluster — air, river, rail and road supporting distribution, third‑party repair and manufacturing services — and recommended policies to foster similar clusters near ports and inland intermodal centers.

Automation and labor: witnesses said increased productivity at constrained port sites will require automation. Sheffi called automation necessary to increase density where land is scarce but warned of difficult negotiations with unions. “The port of the United States have a very difficult time to automate,” he said, noting restrictions and political resistance that can slow technology adoption.

Several committee members and witnesses urged a national, coordinated port infrastructure strategy that aligns federal, state and local investments with private operators’ technical expertise. Witnesses noted that many global terminal operators and large private firms already possess the operational knowledge to run high‑efficiency terminals but need more predictable rules and investment frameworks to deploy technology at scale.

Ending: Witnesses asked Congress to consider policies that speed port upgrades, expand intermodal hubs, and create stable investment conditions so terminal operators and private firms can modernize operations rather than withdraw or delay projects.