Recent reports have come to light that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack never actually took the time to attend any of his assigned meetings for the task force that he was assigned as the co-chair in order to help resolve the supply chain issues for the country, according to a request from public records instituted by the Functional Government Institute.
A request for public records coming from the Functional Government Institute discovered that the Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force, which was spawned just over two years ago by the White House, has been a failure due to entirely non-existent leadership. The Department of Agriculture only had a grand total of 19 pages of records related to the entity after a period of five months and a massive federal lawsuit from the Functional Government Institute. 14 of these pages were outright copies straight out of public statements concerning the initiative, and not a single record showed any sort of evidence that Vilsack or his deputies attended even one of the meetings.
“As the administration rightly recognized in creating the Task Force, supply chain issues threaten the economic and national security of the country,” explained Functional Government Institute Spokesman Peter McGinnis via a release to the press. “Secretary Vilsack’s failure to convene a single meeting with his fellow leaders, while dedicating federal resources to investigate and blame the private sector, shows that the Task Force was little more than a cynical attempt to signal engagement on supply chain disruptions while, in fact, doing little or nothing.”
Both Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg were also marked as co-chairs of the task force, as seen in a statement from June 2021 issued by the White House, which went on to add that the officials would focus on heavily bottlenecked products such as semiconductors, construction materials, and food supplies. As part of another release to the press, Vilsack stated that he was quite eager to “mobilize a whole-of-government effort to address the short-term supply challenges our country faces as it recovers.”
It was spotlighted by the Functional Government Institute that the calendar for Buttigieg over the course of his two-month paternity leave shows that he did not take part in any meetings at all for the group. When looking at more recent events, Buttigieg took a vacation out to Portugal just prior to the possibility of a nationwide rail strike threatened the country last year.