Generally, invoking the DPA allows the government to take a wide range of actions, Todd Tucker, the director of industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, told me. Now Biden will also allow the Department of Energy to do the same. Under Trump, the Department of Health and Human Services used the DPA for the first time. But the Trump administration-and now the Biden administration-turned to the DPA as a policy-making tool as supply chains stuttered to a stop. The law has been used thousands of times every year since it was passed in 1950, mostly by the Department of Defense. That’s because it allows the government to take a number of actions to speed up production and prevent shortfalls, including subsidizing private production of a certain good, securing more raw materials for a production process, or expediting the shipment of products across the country. Seemingly every problem has called for the DPA as a solution: Our economy today is physically constrained, and the DPA is one of the few laws that lets the White House operate in the realm of the physical. In March, the White House invoked the law to secure more minerals for electric-vehicle-battery production. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have activated it in high-profile ways several times over the past two years, including to alleviate shortages of COVID-19 drugs and infant formula. It signals that with the White House’s climate legislation stalling in Congress, President Joe Biden is willing to use his sweeping executive authority, including under defense bills, to achieve his goals.Įven before the move, the Defense Production Act was the law of the moment. This move may sound like standard federal paper-shuffling ( heat pumps!?), but it amounts to one of the most aggressive executive actions that the administration has yet taken on climate change. On Monday, the White House announced that it was invoking the Defense Production Act to boost manufacturing of certain technologies that will be essential for decarbonization, such as solar panels, heat pumps, and transformers for the electrical grid. Sign up for The Weekly Planet, Robinson Meyer’s newsletter about living through climate change, here.Ī legal relic dating back to the Korean War has become one of the White House’s most important tools to pursue its climate goals.
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