Trump began late last month by criticizing GM for “wasting time” and issuing a memorandum directing the secretary of health and human services to require GM to prioritize the government’s requests for ventilators under the statute. According to GM, however, the memorandum had no effect on its already-announced plans to make ventilators at one of its Indiana plants, and the administration has provided no details to the contrary. Last Friday, Trump issued another memorandum empowering the HHS secretary to procure N95 masks from 3M Company, but the administration’s biggest move has been to block the company from fulfilling overseas contracts, prompting 3M to issue a press release warning that international retaliation would result in a net loss of masks available in the United States.

One key takeaway from this ongoing saga is that there is no magic in the DPA’s mere invocation. The question is not whether the administration is invoking the statute, but precisely what that invocation makes possible and whether it serves the country’s complex supply needs. The DPA is a multipart law—not a big stick that forces results from otherwise uncooperative manufacturers, but a set of assorted authorities that enable the executive branch to take on the central-strategist role that no other entity has the information, resources, or mandate to execute.

This might not be obvious when the DPA is viewed through the lens of recent prior use. The New York Times recently highlighted the Trump administration’s reliance on the statute hundreds of thousands of times to prioritize Department of Defense procurements. Indeed, since the law’s passage in 1950, it has been invoked by every administration to prioritize federal contracts or to shore up vulnerabilities in domestic production that threaten the defense industrial base—to secure the supply of titanium sponge, for example, as Trump did by executive order on February 27. These are textbook DPA scenarios, in which the timely delivery of supplies is crucial for military operations, or low return on investment prevents the domestic private sector from developing and maintaining the infrastructure to reliably supply the country with a key industrial resource.

A pandemic that pushes domestic and global production capacity to its limits is an extraordinary circumstance, one that calls for rapid, outside-the-box deployment of all components of the statute, including those that are rarely or narrowly used. Most of these authorities—in particular, the ones outlined in Titles III and VII—were conspicuously missing from Trump’s initial March 13 executive order authorizing the HHS secretary to prioritize and allocate certain resources in the civilian market. As commentators quickly and correctly noted, the order did not actually trigger any concrete federal action; it only declared that health and medical resources needed to respond to the spread of COVID-19 meet the criteria of the DPA. But the order was limited in other major respects as well.