Analyzing Risk in Global Supply Chains: Commerce Department Seeks Feedback to Inform Risk Assessment Framework

Public Comments due by June 21

To support resilient supply chains for U.S. industry, the Department of Commerce (DoC) is seeking public comments by June 21 to inform its work on assessing and analyzing risk in global supply chains. Comments will inform the DoC’s analytical tools and methodologies designed to assess supply vulnerabilities across all major sectors of the economy.

All interested stakeholders, including U.S. industry, researchers, labor organizations, academia, and civil society are encouraged to respond to the DoC’s request for public comments, published in the June 3 Federal Register.

Efforts to Support the Supply Chain

The request specifies that feedback will build on the supply chain work of the Industry & Analysis (I&A) unit housed within the DoC’s International Trade Administration (ITA). The DoC recently launched a first-of its-kind Supply Chain Center to serve as an analytic engine to help drive decision-making and policy action on efforts to strengthen supply chain resilience, leveraging I&A's industry expertise to make the government's work on supply chains more proactive and impactful. To that end, to boost the U.S. government's ability to understand systemic supply chain risks, the Supply Chain Center is focusing efforts on a cross-sectoral risk assessment framework, also known as the “tool.”

Furthermore, the DoC will consider feedback to factor in the determination of an initial list of “critical sectors” and “key goods,” provided under the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) Agreement Relating to Supply Chain Resilience, also known as the Supply Chain Agreement.

The Agreement, which entered into force in February 2024, provides the tools for its 14 IPEF partners to identify supply chain vulnerabilities and to build “resilient, efficient, productive, sustainable, transparent, diversified, secure, fair, and inclusive supply chains.”

Request for Information

Ultimately, through its request for information, the DoC aims to improve its understanding of public views on how the DoC and I&A should assess risk in global supply chains, including what indicators and data sets it should include in the development of an economy-wide risk assessment tool, and how to apply the factors outlined in the Supply Chain Agreement in its determination of the United States' initial list of critical sectors and key goods under the Supply Chain Agreement.

The Federal Register RFI provides general methodology questions that will inform DoC’s Supply Chain Risk Assessment Framework, including:

• What tools, approaches, and methodologies could Commerce use to assess a supply chain's areas of greatest vulnerability? How can those vulnerabilities be quantified and tracked over time?

   

• What factors influence your organization's evaluation of risk in your supply chains? What additional data, information, or analysis from the U.S. government would you view as valuable in this assessment?

   

• How should the U.S. government leverage technological advancements to foster data collection, analysis, and dissemination for both public and private entities?

   

• What data, indicia, or criteria might help Commerce identify those supply chains where the market would be least likely to prevent or quickly resolve a disruption?

IPEF-related questions will inform the U.S. list of critical sectors and key goods under the Supply Chain Agreement, including the thresholds or metrics DoC should consider in assessing the risk of such disruptions for the purposes of identifying critical sectors and key goods, among other considerations.

The DoC reports that this the first effort by the U.S. government to assess supply chain vulnerability across all major sectors of the economy.

Response requirements are listed in the Federal Register.

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