The president’s remarks amounted to a rebuke of governors’ recent pleas for more robust federal intervention amid the rapidly spreading outbreak, which they warn will soon overwhelm local health care systems if hospital beds, face masks and other necessities are not soon furnished in significantly greater numbers.

Trump said Thursday the administration will “help out wherever we can,” but added that the acquisition of urgent supplies “is really for the local governments, governors and people in the state, depending on the way they divide it up. And they’ll do that, and they’re doing a very good job of it.”

But earlier Thursday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, the current epicenter of the outbreak in the U.S., exhorted the administration to help meet the demand for equipment. Cuomo has specifically sounded the alarm over the lack of ventilators in states across the nation, warning that New York would require five or six times its current supply of the respiratory machines to treat the projected number of coronavirus patients.

“Every state is shopping for ventilators. We’re shopping for ventilators. We literally have people in China shopping for ventilators, which is one of the largest manufacturers. So this is a major problem,” Cuomo said at his daily news conference, adding that the administration “can actually play a very constructive role” under the DPA.

“We’re going to need protective equipment in hospitals,” Cuomo said. “We’re going to need ventilators. And that is something that a state can’t do, but the federal government can do.”

Trump announced Wednesday that he would dispatch one of the Navy’s two hospital ships to New York Harbor, while the other prepared to deploy to a location on the West Coast. The vessels are equipped with 1,000 hospital beds each and are intended to relieve civilian hospitals struggling with capacity in the face of the public health crisis.

The Pentagon also took several actions this week, including putting on alert 1,000 “deployable” beds from a variety of different medical units, making available up to 5 million respirator masks and other personal protective equipment from its own reserves, and distributing up to 2,000 ventilators to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday called for construction companies to donate their inventories of N95 protective masks to local hospitals and halt new mask orders, and said Thursday that the administration had “literally identified tens of thousands of ventilators that can be converted to treat patients.” He did not say where the ventilators were found.

Despite those measures, the Trump administration has not completed a comprehensive assessment to determine the full scope of supplies that will need to be ordered, according to current and former administration officials, and his invoking the DPA does not do anything to increase production of those items.

Public health experts, meanwhile, have encouraged increased coordinaton between the administration and manufacturers assembling medical equipment for health care providers. “They need to receive assurances from the federal government that they will be compensated, even if health care institutions don’t end up needing the equipment,” wrote Tom Inglesby and Anita Cicero, both of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in an op-ed earlier this month.

Following the White House briefing, the president traveled to FEMA headquarters in Washington to participate in a video teleconference with governors on COVID-19 response efforts. In a memo from the National Governors Association delivered to Trump and Pence ahead of the call, the states’ chief executives outlined their “top needs and priorities to be shared” with the administration.

Among their list of major concerns, the governors requested that the federal government “increase access to [personal protective equipment], masks, test kits, [and] extraction kits,” and demanded “accelerating the production of life-saving equipment, such as ventilators.” They also asked for the administration to “provide guidance on [the] implementation of” the DPA.

Myah Ward contributed to this report.