Last week, U.S. Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., announced he was backing Rep. French Hill’s, R-Ark., bill amending the Defense Production Act (DPA) to help with the availability of medical equipment during the coronavirus pandemic.
At the end of March, Hill introduced the “Securing America’s Vaccines for Emergencies (SAVE) Act” which Steube threw his support behind last week. U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., cosponsored the bill earlier this month.
“The DPA, which was invoked by President Trump on March 18, 2020, provides the federal government more control during times of emergencies to direct industrial production. Rep. Hill’s legislation dovetails with the president’s actions by diversifying America’s medical supply chain, with the intention of making the United States less dependent on foreign manufacturers, like China,” Hill’s office noted.
“The SAVE Act is critical because it will decrease our nation’s reliance on other countries for medical supplies and ensure that during times of a public health emergency, like we are experiencing right now, we will have the supplies we need to keep Arkansans and Americans safe. It complements the actions President Trump has already taken to ensure that our country will have a reliable and necessary source of medical supplies during times of emergency,” Hill said when he introduced the proposal.
According to his office, Hill’s bill “outlines the president should use DPA authorities to ensure the availability of medical articles essential to national defense, specifically as it relates to securing our supply chains; clarifies that the president may provide incentives to ensure the availability of medical articles essential for national defense; requires the president to create a strategy on securing medical article supply chains, including for drugs that diagnose, cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent disease; and provides the president explicit authority to use the DPA to protect supply chains by allowing entities to increase the security of supply chains and their activities.”
“The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the fact that so many critical products and aspects of America’s medical supply chain are controlled by shady foreign governments, like Communist China,” said Steube last week. “In times of national emergency, we must be able to rely on our own country to provide necessary supplies to keep our citizens safe. This legislation empowers American manufacturing and puts America first.”
Hill’s bill is before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee. So far, there is no counterpart over in the U.S. Senate.
Reach Kevin Derby at kevin.derby@floridadaily.com.
jerry dycus
May 26, 2020, 1:09 pm at 1:09 pm
How stupid, lame. But what do you expect from Repubs. And they don’t seem to learn like on PPE, tariffs you just limit supply, put the Ag, manufacturing industry in recession before the virus.
Fact is we’ll need multiple vaccines and the most promising to be fastest are overseas which would because the US does, limit supplies especially to the US.
Trump has hollowed out our government’s health, pandemic ability to respond and seems to do at every turn, the wrong thing like not buying WHO tests and test everyone flying , coming in back in January when it was clear and stopping it until March 10th when he finally allowed labs, private companies, hospitals make them which together with no PPE stockpile, letting China have it in
January, most of February and not opening up new PPE , mask production lines on purpose as would look bad he said multiple times.
That has been the difference between us not having to lock down, minimal deaths to over 200k before the yrs end, 90% unnecessary because of Trump’s ego, incompetence.
And the public has noticed all the lies by Trump and his groveling enablers, cowards scared he might say bad things about them too. That is what Repub party has become. Pitiful.
And the polls Trump/repubs dropped 10% among older voters for sacrificing them to reopen the country 2 wks too early, wasting what we had done.
And now it’s Trump country’s turn to get sick thanks again to Trump incompetence, opening too early will not go down well either.
See you in November ;^)