Congress should not retreat from the DPA’s historic role as a flexible tool to secure the general economic stability of the United States. The economic origins and application of the Defense Production Act may strike some as counterintuitive and unusual. That’s because the DPA is a modern outlier—a vestige of the pre-neoliberal era, when policymakers pursued national and economic security needs in concert. We forget the lessons of this history at our own risk. The threats the United States faces this century will be all the more difficult to vanquish if we narrowly circumscribe our capabilities for strengthening economic resilience. Any effort to “rein in” the DPA would needlessly weaken both the law and our national security…

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