Navarro's comments suggest that the hands-off approach to GM may not be accelerating production.

Confusion over exactly who is in charge, combined with the White House’s lax oversight of GM since the order, have led some in the auto industry to conclude the DPA invocation was little more than an excuse for Trump to shift the blame for a coming ventilator shortage on a company that he’s feuded with in the past.

“I have no reason to believe it was anything other than rhetorical flourish,” said Sam Abuelsamid, a senior automotive analyst at Navigant, a research and consulting firm. “The comments from [Trump] were looking to blame anybody but himself.”

After an angry tweetstorm suggesting that GM was demanding exorbitant sums to make ventilators, last Friday Trump slapped the automaker with an order under the DPA, saying GM was “wasting time."

GM declined to comment on Navarro's remarks or other issues raised by this story, but had already been working on a plan to build ventilators with medical device supplier Ventec Life Systems for more than a week before Trump invoked the DPA.

The DPA is a powerful 1950s-era emergency law that allows the federal government to coordinate the supply chain, manufacturing and distribution of critical goods like ventilators or protective medical gear in a crisis. But Navarro described a restrained approach to using DPA authorities to accelerate production, including relying on voluntary updates from the company, which already had plans to help build ventilators even before the act was invoked.

If updates do not come “for another day or two,” Navarro said, “then we’re going to have to look more closely at that.”

The administration for weeks resisted mounting pressure from congressional Democrats and governors to deploy the law's full powers. On Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), whose state is the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, called on Trump to expand his application of the act.

“President Trump needs to harness industry to quickly produce more medical supplies and equipment under the Defense Production Act NOW,” Schumer tweeted. “He needs to appoint a czar like a military or logistics expert to lead the effort to make and get the supplies where they’re needed.”

DPA experts say despite the GM order, the White House is still refusing to use the full power of the law, which allows the federal government to coordinate industrial production across entire sectors and up and down a supply chain — not just a single company.

“Whoever is making the decisions doesn’t want to use the DPA to the extent of its actual authority,” said Peter Shulman, associate professor at Case Western Reserve University who studies the law’s application throughout history. “They should be mobilizing whole sectors of the economy. This is baffling to me.”

Fully using the DPA would allow a single federal agency to serve as a central hub for the coronavirus industrial response, Shulman and other DPA experts said, avoiding the confusion and competition between states and hospitals that has characterized the coronavirus crisis.

“The DPA is a legal architecture for centralizing, consolidating and understanding where the demand and supply are, where the potentials for manufacturing are, where the bottlenecks in distribution are,” he said. “[It] is available to completely avoid the dysfunction we’re seeing right now.”

For weeks, the White House has shrugged off calls to invoke the act from Schumer and governors of states hard-hit by the virus, treating it as a last resort amid Trump’s public grousing about not wanting to “nationalize” U.S. firms. Then on Friday, after a morning tweetstorm slamming GM and its CEO, Mary Barra, Trump invoked the act for the automaker alone. Since then, the White House’s use of the act has been much narrower than its authority allows.

As he waits for updates from GM, Navarro said he has conceived a “White House challenge” to see how fast GM and rival automaker Ford can produce their first 100 ventilators. “The race is on,” he said.

GM said after Trump’s order on Friday that its commitment has “never wavered,” despite Trump’s accusation it was holding up talks with the federal government over cost. Because the automaker was already moving to retool its business for making ventilators, auto industry insiders say that using the DPA will have minimal, if any, effect on GM’s plan to produce the devices at its plant in Kokomo, Ind. The company announced the plan hours before Trump invoked the emergency law last week.

“I think [the DPA order] was a bit of saber-rattling to be honest with you,” said auto consultant Tony Posawatz, a former GM executive and CEO of electric car company Fisker Automotive. “I don’t think it’s going to change much. [GM and Ventec] already had a lot of things in place.”

Days before the DPA order, GM was already in talks with FEMA about expanding ventilator production. But Navarro said those negotiations broke down because GM demanded too high a price.

“Even though GM was making plans to do so, they were not moving in 'Trump time,' which is to say as quickly as possible,” he said. “And their attitude was, before they would fully commit, ‘Show me the money. Give us the contract.’ And that led to the loss literally of days.”

GM declined to comment on its negotiations with the White House.

Shulman and other DPA experts said Trump’s order was always destined to have little impact because it came after the crisis had been underway for weeks and only targeted one company. Typically, DPA orders in a crisis would target entire industries, or multiple sectors, to coordinate the production and distribution of needed goods.

“The real puzzler is why the [executive order] came out and just listed one company or even one industry,” said Erik Gordon, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. “It could have been an order sent to the auto industry, to the people who build air conditioners. There are other industries with manufacturing capabilities that could have been included in the order.”

“It’s not unique, but it’s stupid in the current situation,” said Shulman. “It doesn’t make sense to just yell at GM when many companies are able to produce ventilators. The entire reason the DPA was passed was to avoid having an ad hoc system of industrial mobilization in a crisis. … It’s to have an organized federal response.”

The researchers say such an organized federal response is exactly what’s lacking in the coronavirus crisis. Indeed, before making Navarro the DPA leader on Friday, Trump had said that Vice President Mike Pence would coordinate the response. Then on Tuesday, Trump said that FEMA would have the leading organizational role, pointing to the agency when asked at a press conference if the administration has a “coronavirus czar.”

The next day, a Ford executive told the NPR program “1A” that his company will ship its ventilators and other medical gear “through Navarro and FEMA … and they will handle distribution.” But Ford is not covered by the DPA order, and a FEMA spokesperson declined to detail the agency’s role in the crisis.

Then, Thursday morning, Trump pivoted again, tweeting in response to Schumer’s call for appointing a czar to oversee supply issues, that “we do have a military man in charge of distributing goods, a very talented Admiral, in fact.” Trump was ostensibly referring to Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, director of FEMA’s supply chain task force, who told Axios on Sunday that he was still “blind to where all the product is.”

Meanwhile, state leaders have complained for weeks that they are unable to buy the ventilators they need and are sometimes pitted against each other and the federal government in procuring the critical equipment. Amid the confusion, multiple White House officials told POLITICO this week that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has become the de facto coordinator of emergency response, with his influence in the White House outweighing that of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who the DPA order also empowered to direct ventilator efforts at GM.

Shulman says that sort of “ad hoc response” is exactly the type of situation the DPA was designed to avoid.

“We’ve spent a century building up a federal apparatus to have protections and agencies and authorities in place for a whole variety of emergencies,” he said. “The Trump administration is acting like they simply don’t exist. They’re acting like the government was in 1908. It’s crazy.”