Under a new bill from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), a new federal agency would take responsibility for eliminating protective gear shortages and other supply scarcities critical to the coronavirus response.

The legislation, to be released on Thursday and shared first with Vox, seeks to remedy the critical supply shortages reported in some Covid-19 hot spots. It also serves as a counter to President Donald Trump’s reluctance to exploit the full power of the Defense Production Act (DPA) to address those problems.

The bill would set up a new Emergency Office of Manufacturing for Public Health within the US Health and Human Services Department. That agency would be charged with guaranteeing “an adequate supply of drugs, devices, biological products, active pharmaceutical ingredients, and other supplies necessary to diagnose, mitigate, and treat COVID-19 and to address shortages in products used to treat non-COVID conditions and illnesses,” according to a summary of the bill.

The office could enter into contracts with private manufacturers to produce those supplies or it could assume responsibility for manufacturing itself. The bill text authorizes the federal government to construct manufacturing facilities if necessary to perform that work. Separate from addressing supply needs, the bill would also authorize the government to construct facilities that could produce vaccines and other therapeutics as soon as they become available.

If the bill were to become law, the office would be required to begin its work within one month of its passage. Once supplies are produced, the government must provide them to federal, state, local and Native American health programs at no cost. They could be sold to private or international entities at a fair price. The office would also be charged with replenishing the national strategic stockpiles that have been depleted during the Covid-19 outbreak.

“We need to radically increase our supply of personal protective equipment and other medical supplies to attack the coronavirus crisis head-on. We have an Administration that is failing to lead and failing to ensure health care providers and patients have the resources they need,” Warren said in a statement. “Our bill will rapidly produce the equipment and supplies Americans are counting on. The president won’t act, but Congress should. Our bill needs to be included in the next relief package.”

The odds of the bill being enacted seem low. Previous legislation from Warren and Schakowsky that shared many similarities, which authorized the federal government to produce generic drugs in the case of shortages or egregious price hikes, did not attract any co-sponsors. Republican Senate leaders have been ambivalent about providing funding for state and local governments; giving the federal government the authority to manufacture supplies itself, circumventing the private market, seems very unlikely.

Nevertheless, the Warren-Schakowsky proposal represents an aggressive vision for harnessing the federal government’s authority to address the supply shortages seen in some parts of the country during the coronavirus crisis. The bill would authorize the government to assume the intellectual property rights to patented products (such as pharmaceuticals) in order to perform its duties, with the patent holder to be compensated with royalties or a one-time payment.

Supply shortages have been a serious problem in US coronavirus hot spots

Mask shortages, in particular, have plagued the Covid-19 response in some hard-hit areas. In mid-March, Premier Inc., a major supplier to US hospitals, reported it had seen demand for surgical masks double from what they usually see: 55 million versus the typical annual demand of between 22 million and 25 million of the N95 masks that are the standard for health care workers. Health care workers at several major health systems told Vox in the early days of the pandemic that they feared for their safety because of lax protocols put in place at their hospital because of supply shortages.

“They’re not protecting us. They’re taking away our masks,” one nurse said. “The one thing we are all worried about is we are shedding the virus to the most vulnerable populations.”

Certain medications have been in short supply during the crisis: drugs for patients being put on ventilators, for example, as well as some drugs that have been hyped by the White House and conservative media as possible treatments for Covid-19.

America’s efforts to ramp up its testing capacity have been hampered by shortages of swabs and other materials necessary to conduct and analyze those tests, as Vox’s German Lopez has written.

Trump has at times been hesitant to exploit the full power of the federal government to address those shortages, offering confusing and flat-out wrong justifications for not doing more. The DPA isn’t about wholesale nationalization, but rather a temporary fix to an urgent problem. As Vox’s Alex Ward explained last month, states often wound up competing for the same equipment without clear federal guidance.

Warren and Schakowsky are proposing a plan to address these shortfalls without relying so directly on the president’s prerogative.

Their legislation is targeted to the coronavirus pandemic specifically. Warren’s office said that if this bill and their generic drug manufacturing bill were to become law, “the infrastructure would continue to exist for the federal government to leverage its manufacturing capabilities to respond to future emergencies.”