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Experts: U.S. ports lag global peers; committee urged to adopt a national port strategy and embrace automation
Summary
Witnesses told the Joint Economic Committee that U.S. ports face capacity, scale and labor challenges, reducing efficiency relative to global peers; they urged a coordinated national strategy, intermodal clustering and careful negotiation with labor around 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…
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