The Defense Production Act and medicines

On March 18, 2020, with hospitals running short of masks and ventilators, the president signed Executive Order 13909¹. It handed the Secretary of Health and Human Services a power from a Korean War-era statute, the Defense Production Act of 1950, to make companies fill government orders for health and medical resources ahead of everyone else's. Within nine days, two more orders gave HHS the law's anti-hoarding authority² and its financing authority³.

Since then the Defense Production Act, or DPA, has come up again and again in debates over medicine shortages. The need has not gone away. FDA's shortage list showed 69 current shortages on November 3, 2026, 71 percent of them injectables, with a median age of 1,710 days, according to GxRadar's analysis of FDA shortage data¹³ on our shortage tracker.

This explainer sets out what the DPA's three remaining titles allow, how presidents have pointed them at drugs and medical supplies since 2020, and why the tools fit poorly with the economics of older generic drugs. The law's main authorities are also on a short clock. Most of them now expire on December 11, 2026.

The three titles still in force

The original law had seven titles, and three remain, according to a Congressional Research Service summary⁸ updated in February 2026.

Title I orders run through regulations that set priority ratings. HHS's own version, the Health Resources Priorities and Allocations System, took final form in a rule published February 9, 2024⁷ and effective March 11, 2024. It sets two ratings. A DX order outranks a DO order, and both outrank unrated commercial orders.

How the 2020 orders put HHS in charge

March's first order named personal protective equipment and ventilators as health and medical resources that met the statute's test, and let HHS add more. The second² used section 102 against hoarding of items such as protective equipment and disinfecting products. The third³ delegated Title III sections 301 to 303 to HHS and Homeland Security and waived several of the statute's prerequisites for the length of the emergency.

Money followed, and some of it moved. The CARES Act appropriated $1 billion in Title III funds for health resources, and the Defense Department later shifted $688 million of it to defense industrial base projects, CRS reported in July 2020¹⁰. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 added $10 billion for DPA use in the pandemic, according to a later CRS report⁹.

Drugs entered the picture in August 2020. Executive Order 13944⁴ told HHS to use section 101 to prioritize federal contracts for essential medicines, medical countermeasures and their critical inputs, and told FDA to list those products. FDA published that list¹² on October 30, 2020; GxRadar covers it in a separate piece. In January 2021, Executive Order 14001⁵ told agencies to use all available authorities, "including the Defense Production Act," to close gaps in pandemic supplies.

A more drug-specific step came on December 27, 2023. In Presidential Determination No. 2024-03⁶, the president found that drugs and biologics on FDA's essential medicines list, plus their critical inputs, were essential to national defense and that U.S. industry could not be expected to supply them without Title III action. The determination waived the statute's usual findings requirements for projects that expand domestic production of those products.

What a rated order can and cannot do

A rated order moves a government buyer to the front of a supplier's queue. HHS's rule describes one pandemic use: it paired its allocation authority with a DX-rated order to redistribute N95 masks that federal authorities had seized. The same rule spells out the limits. A company may not accept a rated order for a delivery date it cannot meet, though it must offer the earliest date it can. It may not charge higher prices on a rated order than on a comparable unrated one. It is also not required to cut its price or offer better terms.

Put plainly, Title I reshuffles existing output. If a plant cannot make more vials of an injectable, a priority rating decides who gets the vials it does make, and someone else waits longer. Title III is the part of the law that can pay for new capacity, but it spends appropriated money, and the statute caps the DPA Fund's annual unobligated balance at $750 million, according to CRS⁹.

Why generics are a hard fit

Most of the drugs that stay on FDA's list are old, off-patent sterile injectables, and the causes are mostly commercial and technical: thin margins, few manufacturing sites and quality failures that shut lines down. GxRadar's pieces on why shortages happen, sterile injectables and generic economics go through those causes.

The DPA touches few of them directly. A priority rating does not approve an abbreviated new drug application, clear a warning letter or meet FDA's manufacturing standards; those stay with FDA under drug law. Federal financing can help build a plant, but the plant then has to sell into a market where prices for many generics have fallen for years. GxRadar's generic price index stood at 47.4 in October 2026, about 53 percent below January 2014. And Title III money can go only to companies in the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia, CRS notes, while much of the ingredient supply for generics comes from elsewhere, as our piece on where ingredients come from describes.

Other federal tools aim at the same problem from different angles: the Strategic API Reserve, the Strategic National Stockpile, FDA's shortage prevention work and the onshoring push of 2025 and 2026.

The sunset clock

Most DPA authorities have always carried an expiration date. They lapsed from October to November 2025 before a stopgap restored them through January 30, 2026, CRS reported⁸. The 2026 defense authorization act moved the date to September 30, 2026, and a law signed September 2, 2026 moved it again, to December 11, 2026, according to the current text of 50 U.S.C. 4564¹¹.

A longer extension is pending. The House Financial Services Committee reported the DPA Modernization Act of 2026 (H.R. 7688) on April 15, 2026, by a 41-0 vote, according to CRS⁹. The bill would extend the law through September 30, 2031, add public health emergency preparedness to the definition of national defense, allow Title I orders only during a declared national emergency, a declared disaster or a public health emergency, and raise the DPA Fund cap to $2 billion. If Congress does not act by December 11, most of the authorities described here would lapse again, leaving in force the few sections the statute exempts from its sunset.