# Defense Production Act The **Defense Production Act of 1950** is the statute that lets the President reach into the private economy in the name of national defense. Passed three months into the Korean War and modeled on the War Powers Acts of 1941–42, it originally included wage and price controls and the power to requisition; those lapsed in 1953. What survived, and has been reauthorized more than fifty times since, is a set of tools that every administration has found reasons to use — and that the second Trump term has turned into the legal chassis for [[American State Capitalism]]. ## The three titles that remain **Title I — priorities and allocations.** The President may require any contract or order "necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense" to be accepted and performed ahead of all others, and may allocate materials, services and facilities. Administered through the Defense Priorities and Allocations System (DPAS), this is the everyday DPA: hundreds of thousands of "rated orders" a year that push defense work to the front of a supplier's queue. It was the authority behind the 2020 orders on ventilators and meatpacking plants. **Title III — expansion of productive capacity.** Loans, loan guarantees, purchases, purchase commitments and direct investment to "create, maintain, protect, expand, or restore domestic industrial base capabilities," with a Defense Production Act Fund to pay for it. Section 303 authorizes the government to buy and install equipment in private plants and to make purchases "without regard to the limitations of existing law," which is the widest grant of spending discretion in the code and the reason it has become the vehicle for equity. Most Title III money is administered by the Department of Defense. **Title VII — everything else.** Voluntary industry agreements with antitrust immunity, the power to compel business information, and — via the 1988 Exon–Florio amendment codified here as section 721 — the [[CFIUS]] review of foreign acquisitions. Section 721 is one of the four provisions exempt from the sunset. "National defense" has been read since the 1990s to include emergency preparedness, critical infrastructure and energy, which is how a Korean War statute came to cover pandemics, batteries and rare earths. ## The second term's use **Minerals.** [[Executive Order 14241]] (March 20, 2025) delegated Section 303 to the Secretary of Defense for domestic mineral production and Sections 301–303 to the head of the [[Development Finance Corporation]], with DPA Fund money transferable to the DFC — the first time DPA financing authority was pushed into a development bank. The named minerals included uranium, copper, potash and gold; the declared "national energy emergency" was the predicate for waiving several statutory conditions. **Equity.** The July 2025 [[MP Materials DoD Rare Earth Partnership]] — $400 million of preferred stock and warrants, a price floor and a magnet offtake, making the Pentagon the company's largest shareholder — was executed under Title III. It is the template entry on the [[Government Equity Stakes Roster]], and Title III is the authority [[Howard Lutnick]] has pointed to for extending equity-taking to defense contractors. The [[Office of Strategic Capital]], which runs the Pentagon's loan book, sits alongside rather than inside the DPA. See [[Emergency Powers Crosswalk]] for how the DPA relates to the other emergency statutes and Strategic and Critical Materials Stockpile for the older, purchase-and-hold model it is displacing. ## The sunset The DPA's non-permanent provisions expire on a schedule and must be reauthorized. They lapsed on **September 30, 2025** when Congress missed the deadline, were revived by continuing resolution through January 30, 2026, and were extended by the FY2026 NDAA (P.L. 119-60, December 2025) to **September 30, 2026** — three weeks from this page's date. Lapse does not unwind existing Title III agreements, and four sections (including CFIUS) never expire, but new rated orders and new Title III awards cannot be made in the gap. The short extensions are themselves the story: a statute that has become the executive's most flexible spending authority is being renewed in months-long increments, which keeps the leverage over its terms — reporting, notification of equity deals, the reach of the "without regard to existing law" clause — in Congress's hands. ## See Also - [[Industrial Policy]] · [[American State Capitalism]] · [[Government Equity Stakes Roster]] - [[Critical Minerals]] · [[MP Materials]] · [[MP Materials DoD Rare Earth Partnership]] · [[Permanent Magnets and the Rare-Earth Supply Chain]] - [[Executive Order 14241]] · [[Development Finance Corporation]] · [[Office of Strategic Capital]] - [[Emergency Powers Crosswalk]] · Strategic and Critical Materials Stockpile · [[CFIUS]] - Advanced Composites and Defense Materials · [[Conflict Minerals]]