Ontario International Airport recorded its fourth consecutive month of passenger growth in March, welcoming 574,819 travelers — a 2.7% year-over-year gain — while commercial air freight tonnage climbed 15.3%, airport officials announced. The headline numbers were driven almost entirely by international traffic, which surged 55.2% to 60,042 passengers in March against the same month last year. Domestic volumes edged down 1.2% to 514,777. Through the first quarter, ONT served 1,546,339 total passengers, up 4.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers and maritime industry leaders held a joint press conference Wednesday to press for passage of the SHIPS for America Act, legislation designed to revitalize the United States shipbuilding capacity and commercial maritime sector. Congressman John Garamendi (D-CA-08), Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Readiness Subcommittee, and Congressman Trent Kelly (R-MS-01), Chairman of the House Armed Services Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, appeared alongside Matt Paxton, President of the Shipbuilders Council of America, and Brian Schoeneman, Chairman of USA Maritime.

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, maritime advocates, and labor leaders will gather on April 22 at the U.S. Capitol to voice support for the Shipbuilding and Harbor Infrastructure for Prosperity and Security (SHIPS) for America Act, a sweeping legislative proposal designed to revive and strengthen the United States maritime industrial base. The press conference is scheduled for 11:00 AM PST / 2:00 PM EST at House Triangle on the Capitol’s East Front.

The Department of Transportation is moving through the final stages of establishing the National Multimodal Freight Network, a federally designated system of highways, railroad lines, maritime routes, airports, and ports that together form the critical infrastructure backbone of U.S. commercial goods movement. The network, mandated under the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act and carried forward under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, is intended to serve as the baseline framework for assessing freight system performance and directing federal investment.

The Department of Transportation’s Freight Logistics Optimization Works program, known as FLOW, represents one of the more operationally significant efforts undertaken by the Multimodal Freight Office since the office’s establishment in September 2023. The initiative operates as a public-private data partnership, collecting purchase order information from importers alongside logistics supply, demand, and throughput data from participating companies, then returning to participants an aggregated daily view of overall logistics network conditions that exceeds what any individual firm could observe from its own operations alone.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office has concluded that the Department of Transportation failed to meet a core statutory obligation tied to its Office of Multimodal Freight Infrastructure and Policy: periodic reporting to Congress on the office’s activities, staffing, and program administration. The finding, released April 20, 2026, carries immediate weight as lawmakers prepare to deliberate on the reauthorization of federal surface transportation funding, which expires at the end of fiscal year 2026.

The authorization underpinning federal surface transportation programs expires at the end of fiscal year 2026, placing Congress in the position of deciding not only the funding levels for the next authorization cycle but the institutional structure through which freight policy is conceived, administered, and coordinated across the federal government. The Multimodal Freight Office, established under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 and still in an early operational phase, sits at the center of that decision.

Congressman John Garamendi (CA-08) and Congresswoman Frederica S. Wilson (FL-24) last week introduced the Transit Workforce Development Act, legislation that would restructure how federal bus grant funding can be deployed to address workforce shortages and training deficits confronting public transit agencies nationwide. The bill has been referred to the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, where Garamendi serves as a senior member. The legislation targets existing grant mechanisms under 49 U.

The nationwide shortage of safe and accessible commercial truck parking has surfaced as one of the more concrete and actionable freight challenges facing the U.S. transportation system, drawing attention from the Department of Transportation’s Multimodal Freight Office as a problem that crosses modal boundaries and resists single-agency resolution. A recent GAO review of the Multimodal Freight Office found that representatives from three of five transportation associations interviewed specifically identified truck parking as an area where the office could drive meaningful progress through improved coordination.

Two major freight disruptions in recent years have placed the resilience of the U.S. multimodal freight system under sustained official scrutiny, exposing both the interconnected fragility of modern supply chains and the value of having a federal office capable of coordinating cross-modal responses in real time. On March 26, 2024, a cargo ship departing the Port of Baltimore struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge, triggering its collapse and closing a major interstate highway corridor through the city.