Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Defense Production Act has emerged as one of the government’s go-to industrial policy tools for addressing urgent national needs and responding to crises. It expanded and hastened the production of ventilators, PPE, and vaccines during the pandemic. It has built up domestic energy security. It has helped resolve baby formula shortages. It has supported safe artificial intelligence development. And most recently, it has helped restore IV fluid production sites damaged by Hurricane Helene.
The DPA can do a lot. But its power has been limited by a lack of effective deployment by most executive agencies. The federal government fails to effectively plan for and coordinate for how it will use the DPA, and most agencies outside of the Department of Defense have little institutional knowledge for how to make use of the law’s powers.
In particular, the government failed to ensure that agencies effectively planned to use the DPA for emergency preparedness in advance of the COVID-19 pandemic. When crisis struck, the Trump administration found itself debating whether to invoke the DPA at all, and figuring out how to do it on the fly. If the government had entered the pandemic with a ready DPA plan, it could have used the law’s authorities to, for example, support collaboration between private vaccine manufacturers (under Title VII), or mobilize private sector experts and civilian professionals to respond to the health crisis (also Title VII), or prioritize and allocate scarce medical resources for pandemic response needs (Title I). And it could have done all of these things more quickly.
These DPA deployment problems were not supposed to happen. In 2009, Congress created the Defense Production Act Committee for the purpose of addressing agencies’ inability to effectively wield the DPA. Envisioned by its congressional proponents as a “Cabinet level forum on industrial policy,” DPAC is comprised of the seventeen agencies designated by the president as DPA authorities, and led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Congress made DPAC responsible for advising the President on the effective use of the DPA, and submitting an annual report to Congress; the President would select an agency to lead the DPA, and would hire an executive director for the Committee.
Unfortunately, DPAC largely failed to launch, and was never effectively implemented. An executive director was never hired, and chairmanship of the Committee was subdelegated down to the FEMA administrator. Openly dissatisfied with DPAC’s performance, Congress scaled back the Committee’s mandate in 2014, narrowing its scope to just planning and coordinating Title I’s priorities and allocations authorities. Even still, DPAC’s function winnowed: as a 2021 Congressional Research Service brief put it, “DPAC’s principal function appears to be developing its annual report to Congress.” Today, the DPAC doesn’t even do that: it has not issued a report in the last three years.
Given the scale of challenges the United States faces—from competition with China, to a diminished defense industrial base, to continued global health risks, to climate change—we must make better use of the DPA. And that means fixing the DPAC.
Four Goals for Revitalizing DPAC
We can’t afford to settle for a DPAC that does little more than issue an occasional report; we need DPAC to be the industrial policy coordinating body it was promised to be. Revitalizing DPAC should center around four goals: (1) strengthening DPAC’s leadership; (2) improving DPA planning and coordination across agencies; (3) expanding DPA capacity among more agencies; and (4) restoring DPAC’s scope to address all of the DPA’s authorities. The north star should be a DPAC that moves beyond reactive use of the law’s powerful authorities and toward deploying them strategically and proactively.
The President, Congress, and the executive agencies can each take steps to achieve these goals. For example, the President could issue an “Executive Order on Revitalizing the Defense Production Act Committee” to create a new White House DPA Coordination Council, which could provide more support to DPAC and to take the lead on coordinating and planning DPA use across agencies. This Council, modeled on the existing White House Competition Council, would be co-led by the Director of the National Economic Council and the National Security Advisor, and would take on the primary responsibility for advancing DPAC’s planning and coordination goals.
The Order should also instruct agencies to produce reports assessing how they can use the DPA—including some of its neglected authorities—both to advance their goals and in response to an emergency. (While useful for emergency response, the text of the DPA also allows the law to be used in non-emergency settings, such as to promote energy production or to build critical infrastructure.) These reports should assess all authorities under the DPA to maximize the use agencies can get out of the law. The Order should also create a formal executive branch rotation program to temporarily embed agency officials at experienced DPA agencies in order to expand DPA capacity across more agencies. And the Order should instruct agencies to develop and perform industrial mobilization planning exercises to bolster their emergency preparedness
Congress could help by providing funding for the Committee to hire staff to assist with planning, coordination, and agency capacity-building. Meanwhile, agencies themselves could self-initiate internal assessments of how they can use the DPA, and set up partnerships to embed their officials with experienced DPA agencies. Agencies that don’t already have them should also set up their own DPA offices.
With the DPA up for reauthorization in September 2025, Congress has a natural opportunity to improve DPAC. And President Biden could vindicate the longstanding bipartisan commitment to the DPA by taking executive action to shore up DPAC so that he leaves his successor with a more robust industrial policy institution. Administrations may bring different priorities and philosophies to how they conduct industrial policy, and the DPA is not – and should not be – unlimited in its reach. But the DPA has long proven to be a vital legal tool to guard against and respond to a wide range of national exigencies, whether war or a pandemic.
Now is the time to establish stronger institutions to execute industrial policy with deliberate strategy and coordination to maximize our ability to prevail against our biggest challenges. Revamping DPAC to achieve its founding potential would be a step toward a stronger American industrial strategy – and to ensuring American resilience and national security.