Politics
Business experts split on criticism of Buttigieg on supply chain issues
Amid images of goods stranded on ships near America’s ports and notable price increases in basic commodities, including food and gasoline, right-wing critics are lambasting Pete Buttigieg in his role overseeing the supply chain as transportation secretary, although business experts in the field are split over whether that criticism is valid.
Business experts who spoke to the Blade — and whose own views may be colored by their political affiliations — offered a range of explanations for the break down in the supply chain, such as a sharp increase in demand among American consumers, the coronavirus pandemic, and a shortage of truck drivers responsible for transporting goods, which led to different conclusions as to whether Buttigieg, the first openly gay person confirmed by the U.S. Senate for a Cabinet position, was responsible.
Daniel Innis, a professor at the University of New Hampshire Peter T. College College of Business and Economics and who specializes in marketing and logistics and is a board member of Log Cabin Republicans, said criticism of Buttigieg is “certainly warranted” because he isn’t showing leadership in bringing stakeholders to the table.
“Pete can help by sitting down with the trucking industry, the railroads and so on and saying, ‘Look, this is a crisis that we have to solve,'” Innis said. “Eventually, you know, we’re going to get to a place where things that are really important aren’t available to us, and this has to be fixed. So you know, we need some leadership coming from Mayor Pete.”
As a result of supply chain issues, consumers are seeing increased prices for goods, including basic necessities like food and gasoline. With the Thanksgiving holiday fast approaching, experts say prices for turkey could be the most expensive in history for American consumers.
Innis, who said the supply chain depends on flow and “if any part of the chain breaks down, the whole thing collapses,” said the problem he’s hearing is on the receiving end at terminal hubs where truck drivers are supposed to pick up goods.
As an example, Innis offered a personal anecdote about being in Savannah, Ga, and seeing about 20 ships on the coastline waiting to come into the port. Such a port, Innis said, would be a first stop for goods before they’re loaded on trains and headed to terminal hubs, where truck drivers then pick it up.
“That’s where it’s breaking down,” Innis said. “Things are not getting picked up. And maybe a month or so ago, the Union Pacific Railroad basically barred anything coming out of LA for a week, so they could clear out the stuff from the Chicago terminal that wasn’t being picked up. So it seems to me based on my observation that we’ve got a real problem with truck drivers at the final destinations, and they’re not able to pick things up. So it backs up the entire system, and it’s backed up now all the way to the ocean.”
Specific things Buttigieg should be addressing with the trucking industry, Innis said, are why there is an such an acute truck driver shortage and what could be done to address it, including whether or not to change hours of service limiting the number of work hours truckers can drive each day, at least in the short term.
Other ideas Innis brought up, amid a national discussion about making community college free, was whether or not to make truck driver training free or giving 0 percent loans for the cost of school. Additionally, Innis said regulations prohibiting truckers under age 21 from driving across state lines should be scrapped.
“If you can drive from Miami to Jacksonville, which is eight hours, shouldn’t you be able to drive from Jacksonville to Charleston, which is four?” Innis said. “So you see, these are the things that he needs to be talking with the industry about, and maybe taking steps to address. And with just those little things, even if you pick up 10 or 15 percent of capacity, you have really moved things forward, maybe enough to start to gradually bring down the backlog.”
But defenders of the Biden administration say the supply chain breakdowns are complications of the increased demand, not any mismanagement at the top.
Jason Miller, associate professor of supply chain management at the Michigan State University Eli Broad College of Business, echoed the sense the blame for supply chain issues should be placed on increased demand and not Buttigieg.
“The disruptions the import supply chain is experiencing are due to record demand for imports due to record consumer spending on durable goods,” Miller said. “As such, there is nothing Secretary Buttigieg could truly do in such a scenario.”
Indeed, as Miller pointed out, waterborne containerized imports by weight through the first nine months of 2021 are up 17 percent from the first nine months of 2019, according to data from the Census Bureau obtained from USA Trade Online.
“This is why I like to characterize the import supply chain as strained due to record demand, as opposed to broken,” Miller concluded.
Innis, however, said ascribing supply chain issues to the simple increase in demand for goods — while valid in some respects — was over-simplifying matters, pointing out supply chain issues include goods produced and distributed domestically.
“Meat is not being imported from China,” Innis said. “It’s not sitting on a container, nor is bread, nor paper products nor all of these things that aren’t showing up in our stores. My nephew works at Whole Foods. He says they’re getting half shipments from companies. That is not sitting out on the ocean. And so, I’m not buying it across every category.”
Lisa Anderson, a supply chain expert and blogger with the Claremont, Calif.-based LMA Consulting Group, said Buttigieg has fallen short in his role as transportation secretary amid the supply crisis, concluding with respect to objections over his performance: “Unfortunately, the criticism is warranted.”
Among the tasks Buttigieg should take on, Anderson said, are touring the ports, talking to truck drivers and owner operators to understand the constraints from the front lines, coordinating with groups such as the Inland Empire Economic Partnership, the center of the logistics supply chain and conduit from Asia to the rest of the United States and finding ways to bridge government interests with business interests for the common good.
“It is a complex issue and will require strong leadership, involvement, collaboration, innovation and new thinking (breaking the traditional thinking) to resolve,” Anderson concluded.
Right-wing critics have seized on the supply chain issues and turned them into an indictment of the transportation secretary, who with his spouse Chasten Buttigieg, is a new parent, electing to stay on paternity leave for two months as the crisis unfolded.
Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, in a segment last month calling Buttigieg missing in action over the supply chain crisis, speculated Buttigieg may have taken off work “learning how to breast feed,” which defenders of Buttigieg denounced as a homophobic attack (although the snide comment could easily be made of a man in an opposite-sex relationship opting to go on paternity leave). Later, Carlson in a subsequent segment posited affirmative action is only the reason Buttigieg has the role of transportation secretary, implying the position was given to the former South Bend mayor and presidential candidate simply because he’s gay.
Innis, distancing himself from other critics in right-wing media despite his conservative political affiliations, said he was “not going to criticize” Buttigieg’s decision to go on paternity leave, which he called “something that is a part of life.”
The coronavirus pandemic, which disrupted livelihoods and economies from top to bottom across the globe, has also been identified as a factor in complications with the global supply chain, regardless of the administration in power.
Mahour Parast, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment who specializes in supply chain risk and resilience management, said “external shocks” can be in play with such systems and pointed to coronavirus as an example of such a disruption.
“A supply chain that is designed to be efficient (e.g. cost-effective) cannot be simultaneously resilient to disruptions,” Parast said. “This means that when disruptions such as COVID happen, the supply chain has difficulty to be responsive (because the entire system is designed to be efficient and to minimize cost). To be efficient, redundancy should be eliminated because redundancy adds cost to the system. To be resilient, redundancy is needed because it increases a system’s responsiveness.”
As an example of an eliminated redudancy that could end up being needed in a supply chain crisis, Parast pointed to the decision to move operations overseas to benefit from lower production cost or access to raw materials, which he said leads to cost savings at the expense of responsiveness and agility.
“One can make supply chains more resilient by regionalizing supply chain operations in which case there are several locations to back up each other in case of disruptions,” Parast said.
The Biden administration, for its part, has declared steps it would take to ease supply chain issues, mostly consistent with the dispersement of U.S. government money as a short-term solution. On Tuesday, the White House announced funding for a pop-up container yard project underway at the Port of Savannah, a $420 million grant program for ports and marine highways launched within the next 45 days and identifying coastal and waterway projects by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers construction.
The White House announcement comes days after President Biden signed into law the bipartisan infrastructure package after months of negotiations among lawmakers, which he was set on Wednesday to promote at an event at the Port of Baltimore.
In his defense, Buttigieg has said in media appearances that supply chain issues aren’t the result of mismanagement, but prosperity and suppliers not being able to keep up under Biden administration policies seeking to lift the country up from economic stagnation.
Buttigieg, appearing on a CNN segment last month with Jake Tapper to respond to criticism about supply chain issues, said the problem exists because “retail sales are through the roof.”
“If you think about those images of ships, for example, waiting at anchor on the West Coast, you know, every one of those ships is full of record amounts of goods that Americans are buying because demand is up, because income is up, because the president has successfully guided this economy out of the teeth of a terrifying recession,” Buttigieg said. “Now the issue is, even though our ports are handling more than they ever have, record amounts of goods coming through, our supply chains can’t keep up.”
In June, the Biden administration set up a supply chain disruptions task force, which is led by the secretaries of commerce, transportation, and agriculture and charged with focusing on areas where a mismatch between supply and demand has been evident: homebuilding and construction, semi-conductors, transportation and agriculture and food.
A Department of Transportation spokesperson, asked by the Washington Blade to comment for this article, said Buttigieg in his role as co-chair of the Task Force “is focused on ensuring that the Department is doing all it can to address these issues and has made progress along the way.”
Among other examples, the spokesperson pointed to the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach announcing they would expand hours of operation; new support for paid apprenticeship programs in the truck driving industry; and Union Pacific railroad announcing it would go to 24/7 operations.
Innis, at the end of the day, rejected the idea Buttigieg’s hands were tied, saying despite increased demand causing blockages in the supply chain “there are steps that can be taken to ease it, and those are not being taken.”
“When you drill down into certain product categories, there are severe problems that aren’t being addressed that have nothing to do with the oceans, or even the trains,” Innis said. “Because your bread isn’t riding on a train. It’s on a truck coming from a local area. And these shortages are real. You walk through the grocery store, you see it.”
Congress
Van Hollen speaks at ‘ICE Out for Good’ protest in D.C.
ICE agent killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7
U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) is among those who spoke at an “ICE Out for Good” protest that took place outside U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s headquarters in D.C. on Tuesday.
The protest took place six days after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis.
Good left behind her wife and three children.
(Video by Michael K. Lavers)
Congress
Advocates say MTG bill threatens trans youth, families, and doctors
The “Protect Children’s Innocence” Act passed in the House
Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has a long history of targeting the transgender community as part of her political agenda. Now, after announcing her resignation from the U.S. House of Representatives, attempting to take away trans rights may be the last thing she does in her official capacity.
The proposed legislation, dubbed “Protect Children’s Innocence Act” is among the most extreme anti-trans measures to move through Congress. It would put doctors in jail for up to 10 years if they provide gender-affirming care to minors — including prescribing hormone replacement therapy to adolescents or puberty blockers to younger children. The bill also aims to halt gender-affirming surgeries for minors, though those procedures are rare.
Greene herself described the bill on X, saying if passed, “it would make it a Class C felony to trans a child under 18.”
According to KFF, a nonpartisan source for health policy research, polling, and journalism, 27 states have enacted policies limiting youth access to gender-affirming care. Roughly half of all trans youth ages 13–17 live in a state with such restrictions, and 24 states impose professional or legal penalties on health care practitioners who provide that care.
Greene has repeatedly introduced the bill since 2021, the year she entered Congress, but it failed to advance. Now, in exchange for her support for the National Defense Authorization Act, the legislation reached the House floor for the first time.
According to the 19th, U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.), the first trans member of Congress, rebuked Republicans on the Capitol steps Wednesday for advancing anti-trans legislation while allowing Affordable Care Act tax credits to expire — a move expected to raise health care costs for millions of Americans.
“They would rather have us focus in and debate a misunderstood and vulnerable one percent of the population, instead of focusing in on the fact that they are raiding everyone’s health care,” McBride said. “They are obsessed with trans people … they are consumed with this.”
Polling suggests the public largely opposes criminalizing gender-affirming care.
A recent survey by the Human Rights Campaign and Global Strategy Group found that 73 percent of voters in U.S. House battleground districts oppose laws that would jail doctors or parents for providing transition-related care. Additionally, 77 percent oppose forcing trans people off medically recommended medication. Nearly seven in 10 Americans said politicians are not informed enough to make decisions about medical care for trans youth.
The bill passed the House and now heads to the U.S. Senate for further consideration.
According to reporting by Erin Reed of Erin In The Morning, three Democrats — U.S. Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas and Don Davis of North Carolina — crossed party lines to vote in favor of the felony ban, joining 213 Republicans. A total of 207 Democrats voted against the bill, while three lawmakers from both parties abstained.
Advocates and lawmakers warned the bill is dangerous and unprecedented during a multi-organizational press call Tuesday. Leaders from the Human Rights Campaign and the Trevor Project joined U.S. Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.), Dr. Kenneth Haller, and parents of trans youth to discuss the potential impact of restrictive policies like Greene’s — particularly in contrast to President Donald Trump’s leniency toward certain criminals, with more than 1,500 pardons issued this year.
“Our MAGA GOP government has pardoned drug traffickers. They’ve pardoned people who tried to overthrow the government on January 6, but now they want to put pediatricians and parents into a jail cell for caring for their kids,” said Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson. “No one asked for Marjorie Taylor Greene or Dan Crenshaw or any politician to be in their doctor’s office, and they should mind their own business.”
Balint, co-chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, questioned why medical decisions are being made by lawmakers with no clinical expertise.
“Parents and doctors already have to worry about state laws banning care for their kids, and this bill would introduce the risk of federal criminal prosecution,” Balint said. “We’re talking about jail time. We’re talking about locking people up for basic medical care, care that is evidence-based, age-appropriate and life-saving.”
“These are decisions that should be made by doctors and parents and those kids that need this gender-affirming care, not certainly by Marjorie Taylor Greene.”
Haller, an emeritus professor of pediatrics at St. Louis University School of Medicine, described the legislation as rooted in ideology rather than medicine.
“It is not science, it is just blind ideology,” Haller said.
“The doctor tells you that as parents, as well as the doctor themselves, could be convicted of a felony and be sentenced up to 10 years in prison just for pursuing a course of action that will give your child their only chance for a happy and healthy future,” he added. “It is not in the state’s best interests, and certainly not in the interests of us, the citizens of this country, to interfere with medical decisions that people make about their own bodies and their own lives.”
Haller’s sentiment is echoed by doctors across the country.
The American Medical Association, the nation’s largest organization that represents doctors across the country in various parts of medicine has a longstanding support for gender-affirming care.
“The AMA supports public and private health insurance coverage for treatment of gender dysphoria and opposes the denial of health insurance based on sexual orientation or gender identity,” their website reads.
Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, senior vice president of public engagement campaigns at the Trevor Project, agreed.
“In Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bill [it] even goes so far as to criminalize and throw a parent in jail for this,” Heng-Lehtinen said. “Medical decisions should be between patients, families, and their doctors.”
Rachel Gonzalez, a parent of a transgender teen and LGBTQ advocate, said the bill would harm families trying to act in their children’s best interests.
“No politician should be in any doctor’s office or in our living room making private health care decisions — especially not Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Gonzalez said. “My daughter and no trans youth should ever be used as a political pawn.”
Other LGBTQ rights activists also condemned the legislation.
Tyler Hack, executive director of the Christopher Street Project, called the bill “an abominable attack on the transgender community.”
“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s last-ditch effort to bring her 3-times failed bill to a vote is an abominable attack on the transgender community and further cements a Congressional career defined by hate and bigotry,” they said. “We are counting down the days until she’s off Capitol Hill — but as the bill goes to the floor this week, our leaders must stand up one last time to her BS and protect the safety of queer kids and medical providers. Full stop.”
Hack added that “healthcare is a right, not a privilege” in the U.S., and this attack on trans healthcare is an attack on queer rights altogether.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene has no place in deciding what care is necessary,” Hack added. “This is another attempt to legislate trans and queer people out of existence while peddling an agenda rooted in pseudoscience and extremism.”
U.S. Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, also denounced the legislation.
“This bill is the most extreme anti-transgender legislation to ever pass through the House of Representatives and a direct attack on the rights of parents to work with their children and their doctors to provide them with the medical care they need,” Takano said. “This bill is beyond cruel and its passage will forever be a stain on the institution of the United States Congress.”
The bill is unlikely to advance in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to pass.
Politics
LGBTQ Democrats say they’re ready to fight to win in 2026
DNC winter meetings took place last weekend in Los Angeles
The Democratic National Committee held its annual winter meetings in Downtown Los Angeles over the weekend, and queer Democrats showed up with a clear message for the national organization: don’t abandon queer and transgender people.
Following last year’s disastrous presidential and congressional elections, many influential pundits and some powerful lawmakers called on Democrats to distance the party from unpopular positions on trans rights, in order to win swing districts by wooing more conservative voters.
But members of the DNC’s LGBTQ Caucus say that’s actually a losing strategy.
“There are still parts of our party saying we need to abandon trans people in order to win elections, which is just not provable, actually. It’s just some feelings from some old consultants in DC,” LGBTQ Caucus Chair Sean Meloy says.
Some national Democrats are already backtracking from suggestions that they walk back on trans rights.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom grabbed national attention in March when he suggested that it was “deeply unfair” for trans girls to play in women’s sports. But last week, he doubled down on support for trans rights, claiming to have signed more trans-rights legislation than any governor in the country, and entering into feuds on X with Elon Musk and Nicki Minaj over his support for trans kids.
Democrats are also clearly feeling the wind in their sails recently after major election victories in Virginia and New Jersey last month, as well as victories in dozens of local and state legislative elections across the country in 2025.
“[Abigail] Spanberger in Virginia didn’t win by dodging the trans question. She won by attacking it, confronting it, and that’s how she got ahead,” says Vivian Smotherman, a trans activist and at-large member of the DNC’s LGBTQ Caucus.
“Trans people are not a problem. We are a resource,” Smotherman says. “For my community, surviving into adulthood is not a guarantee, it’s an accomplishment. You don’t walk through a survival gauntlet without learning things … I’m not begging the DNC to protect my community. I’m here to remind you that we are the warriors tempered by fire, and we are fully capable of helping this party win.”
At its own meeting on Friday, the LGBTQ Caucus announced several new initiatives to ensure that queer and trans issues stay top of mind for the DNC as it gears up for the midterm elections next year.
One plan is to formalize the DNC’s Trans Advisory Board as distinct from the LGBTQ Caucus, to help introduce candidates across the country to trans people and trans issues.
“One in three people in this country know a trans person. Two-thirds of Americans don’t think they do,” Smotherman says. “So the real problem is not being trans, it’s that you don’t know us. You cannot authentically support a trans person if you’ve never met one.
“That’s why my first goal with this Trans Advisory Board is to host a monthly Meet a Trans Person webinar. Not as a spectacle, as a debate, but as a human connection, and I will be charging every state chair with asking every one of their candidates up and down the board if they know a trans person. And if that person doesn’t know a trans person, I’m gonna have that state chair put them on that webinar.”
The LGBTQ caucus is also opening up associate membership to allies who do not identify as LGBTQ, in order to broaden support and connections over queer issues.
It’s also preparing for the inevitable attacks Republicans will throw at queer candidates and supporters of LGBTQ issues.
“These attacks are going to come. You have to budget money proactively. You have to be ready to fight,” Meloy says. “There are some local party chairs who don’t want to recruit LGBTQ candidates to run because these issues might come up, right? That’s an absolutely ludicrous statement, but there are still people who need support in how to be ready and how to respond to these things that inevitably come.”
“The oldest joke is that Democrats don’t have a spine. And when they come after us, and we do not reply, we play right into that.”
Meloy also alluded to anti-LGBTQ tropes that queer people are out to harm children, and said that Democrats should be prepared to make the case that it’s actually Republicans who are protecting child abusers – for example, by suppressing the Epstein files.
“They are weak on this issue. Take the fight, empower your parties to say, ‘These people have nothing to stand on,’” Meloy says.
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