Trump’s national security strategy wants spy agencies to watch world supply chains

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President Donald Trump’s national security strategy tasks the U.S. intelligence community with monitoring global supply chains as part of a sweeping goal to decouple the nation’s economy from foreign adversaries and advance American economic interests.

The demands listed in the 33-page strategy document published late Thursday reflect how aggressively the Trump administration is directing federal agencies to treat economic policy as a national security matter, and it comes after months of tariff fights that have become a defining flashpoint of the president’s economic agenda.

U.S. spy agencies “will monitor key supply chains and technological advances around the world to ensure we understand and mitigate vulnerabilities and threats to American security and prosperity,” the strategy reads. 

The demands aren’t the first time that security and defense agencies would be monitoring or bringing awareness to supply chain issues — as is common in those spaces to ensure operational security and the protection of U.S. forces — though the scope of the task is expansive and would involve scrutiny of where American companies and foreign rivals ship, produce and stockpile their goods and services around the world.

Officials for years have argued that foreign adversaries like China and Russia need to be barred from U.S. supply chains, but the nature of the global economy makes the task of separating them out difficult and costly. Many supply chains are digital, which can further complicate decoupling efforts.

The Trump administration, in its strategy, also concludes that the Western Hemisphere provides valuable resources to U.S. interests and that intelligence community analysts will support efforts to “identify strategic points and resources” in the region to both protect them and use them in developments with regional partners.

Cybersecurity also appears in the document. It directs federal agencies to lean more heavily on private sector operators and regional partners to spot intrusions on U.S. networks and move toward what the strategy describes as “real-time” attribution and response.

It also envisions more strategic investment opportunities for American companies in the Western Hemisphere.

“We should also partner with regional governments and businesses to build scalable and resilient energy infrastructure, invest in critical mineral access and harden existing and future cyber communications networks that take full advantage of American encryption and security potential,” the strategy says.

The Trump administration is readying a national cybersecurity strategy, with a release timeline set for early January, a person familiar with the matter previously told Nextgov/FCW, with a focus on offensive cyber matters and more involvement with private sector partners.

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