IE logistics shed 2,200 jobs as Washington pitches a faster supply chain
Citrus Belt Review: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy used a Friday visit last week to the Port of Los Angeles to roll out the American Supply Chain Sovereignty Initiative, a proposal to pre-screen import containers and thread logistics hubs, carriers, and retailers onto a shared dashboard. The pitch was affordability: fewer bottlenecks, faster freight, cheaper goods. The details were thinner — DOT named no cost, the agency's own release didn't mention pre-screening, and the plan needs authority Congress hasn't granted, which Duffy asked lawmakers to fold into this year's defense bill.
Whatever that initiative eventually does, it arrives in an Inland Empire whose logistics economy is already contracting, and not because containers move too slowly. EDD data shows the region's trade, transportation, and utilities sector lost about 2,600 jobs between February and March 2026, with roughly 2,200 of those in transportation and warehousing — the single largest monthly drop of any sector. That came in the same window that pushed Riverside County's unemployment rate to 5.1% and San Bernardino County's to 5.0% in March, both above the 4.3% the EDD logged nationally for the period.
The cuts have names. State WARN filings show France-based Geodis, owned by the French national rail operator, notified the state in late April that it will end 238 jobs at its warehouse on West Baseline Road in Rialto, with separations starting July 3. CJ Logistics America moved to cut 71 positions at a Fontana warehouse; the staffing firm Eclipse Advantage closed its Rancho Cucamonga operation outright. Analysts tracking the regional cuts point to tariffs, softening consumer demand, contract losses, and faster automation — the structural weather of the goods-movement business, not the clearance speed of any single box at San Pedro Bay.
That gap is the story. The national supply-chain conversation runs on throughput: how many of the 52 million containers that hit U.S. ports last year can be cleared faster, screened smarter, moved cheaper. The region that absorbs that freight runs on a different clock — leases, headcount, and contracts that turn on whether goods are flowing at all, and at what margin. A dashboard linking ports to retailers does nothing for a Rialto warehouse losing its anchor tenant. The Inland Empire built the largest warehouse market in the country on the assumption that volume only climbs. The first quarter of 2026 is a reminder that it doesn't, and that policy written for the dock doesn't reach the loading bay.