The Defense Production Act Has Become a License for Central Planning
The Defense Production Act has become President Joe Biden’s go-to “solution” to any market that isn’t operating quite how he’d like. It’s the back door to central planning: just declare any product to be of a vital national security interest. Who’s going to stop you? Certainly not Congress, and so far not the courts either.
The justifications for invoking the DPA are “just getting thinner and thinner the more it gets used,” argues Philip Rossetti, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute. Rossetti tells Reason that the DPA isn’t being used to increase production overall, but rather to reorganize the market under the White House’s direction.
“And that’s going to come at a cost to wherever you’re taking those resources from,” he says, because “government doesn’t produce; government simply takes from one area and puts it towards another.”
