For generations, American infrastructure — from the Erie Canal and the Transcontinental Railroad to the Hoover Dam — has been a cornerstone of our financial energy, offering jobs, facilitating transportation, bolstering safety, and overcoming limitations posed by distance and geography. Throughout Vital Infrastructure Safety and Resilience Month, we renew our dedication to securing and enhancing the resilience of our Nation’s crucial infrastructure.
Threats to the crucial infrastructure that all of us depend upon, which underpins our financial and nationwide safety, are among the many most vital and rising considerations for our Nation, together with cyber threats, bodily threats, and local weather threats. Our nation has seen how the applied sciences we depend on could be focused by prison exercise and the way excessive climate exposes the weaknesses in our energy, water, communication, and transportation networks. We should do all the pieces we will to safeguard and strengthen the methods that defend us; present power to energy our houses, colleges, hospitals, companies, and autos; preserve our potential to attach; and make sure that we’ve got dependable entry to protected ingesting water. Whereas our Nation has been resilient as we’ve got navigated this pandemic, we should proceed investing in our workforce to maintain tempo with the threats we face and guarantee we’re constructing again higher.
I’m dedicated to defending our crucial infrastructure and enhancing safety and resilience efforts throughout the Nation. Most of our Nation’s crucial infrastructure — from communication strains to transportation networks — relies on coordination and cooperation amongst Federal, State, Tribal, and native governments, together with trade companions. That’s the reason, earlier this 12 months, my Administration launched an Industrial Management Methods Cybersecurity Initiative to strengthen the safety of our nation’s crucial infrastructure, which has already created 100-day motion plans for the electrical energy and pure gasoline pipeline sectors, with extra to return, and we institutionalized that Initiative with a Nationwide Safety Memorandum on Enhancing Cybersecurity for Vital Infrastructure Management Methods. The voluntary initiative is a collaborative effort between the Federal Authorities and our non-public sector companions to considerably enhance the cybersecurity of our crucial methods by offering applied sciences that detect threats and may reply in important management system and operational know-how networks. The Division of Homeland Safety and the Nationwide Institute of Requirements and Know-how are additionally partnering with the non-public sector to develop ‘efficiency targets’ — cybersecurity baselines that can enhance our Nation’s safety if crucial infrastructure sectors undertake them. Lastly, crucial infrastructure resilience vastly advantages from shut partnerships at dwelling and overseas, and this October, my Administration launched a Counter Ransomware Initiative with greater than 30 companions and allies.
At dwelling, my Administration is dedicated to creating a once-in-a-generation funding to prioritize safe, sustainable, and resilient infrastructure. Streamlining entry to Federal packages and grants to assist States and native authorities construct capability helps guarantee we’re modernizing our infrastructure to be extra climate-resilient and constructing a clear power future that can create hundreds of thousands of jobs. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal contains $550 billion for our Nation’s roads and bridges, water infrastructure, web, and extra. Our agenda additionally comprises the most important Federal funding in energy transmission in our Nation’s historical past, guaranteeing a extra dependable grid that has the potential to hold extra renewable power. These investments will strengthen our Nation and bolster our potential to guide, and they’re going to assist mitigate socio-economic disparities, advance racial fairness, facilitate equitable restoration, and promote reasonably priced entry to alternatives for each American. Defending our crucial transportation infrastructure — together with our bridges and roads — takes all of us working collectively.
A key dimension of the Nation’s resilience is safeguarding our democracy, which requires securing our election infrastructure. Now we have made great progress working with State and native election officers over the previous a number of years, however there’s extra to be performed. We’re notably targeted on enhancing the bodily safety of election officers as they face rising threats of violence, securing election methods from cyber assaults, and confronting one of the vital vital threats we see at this time: disinformation campaigns designed to undermine confidence in our elections, and finally, confidence in our democracy and our democratic establishments.
The threats in opposition to our crucial infrastructure are more and more complicated and nuanced, and all of us have to be ready to raised defend ourselves from malicious actors threatening our cyber and bodily safety. Which means staying vigilant, investing in new safety measures, being ready to reply to threats, and collaborating extra with our companions. Throughout Vital Infrastructure Safety and Resilience Month, we reaffirm our dedication to defending our infrastructure at this time and securing it for tomorrow.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the USA of America, by advantage of the authority vested in me by the Structure and the legal guidelines of the USA, do hereby proclaim November 2021 as Vital Infrastructure Safety and Resilience Month. I name upon the individuals of the USA to acknowledge the significance of defending our Nation’s infrastructure and to look at this month with applicable measures to reinforce our nationwide safety and resilience.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I’ve hereunto set my hand this twenty-ninth day of October, within the 12 months of our Lord two thousand twenty-one, and of the Independence of the United States of America the 2 hundred and forty-sixth.
JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.