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Rachel del Guidice: I’m joined today on The Daily Signal Podcast by Congressman French Hill of Arkansas. Congressman Hill, it’s great to have you on The Daily Signal Podcast.

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Rep. French Hill: Rachel, it’s great to be with you. Thanks for the invitation.

Del Guidice: Well, thank you for making the time. We do appreciate it. You recently introduced legislation to ensure that the United States is less dependent on foreign manufacturers like China. Can you tell us how your legislation would work?

Hill: You bet. And I want to thank [The Heritage Foundation] for its good research here. I thought your interview with Tori Smith was particularly good.

The supply chain is a national security asset and members of Congress on both sides of the hill are thinking about, “Well, how should we approach it? What’s the right way to consider that considering we have a free-market economy and, obviously, we have sources of supply around the world for all countries?”

So my view was let’s amend the Defense Production Act, the DPA. Recently, President [Donald] Trump undertook his authorities under the DPA to compel … greater ventilator construction in the United States.

So the Defense Production Act, dating back to the Korean War and the Truman administration allows America to step up resources in time of war for national security purposes in domestic construction.

My vision was let’s add to that planning node medical supplies, both pharmaceutical ingredients, medical equipment, and what we think of now is PPE—personal protective equipment—and other medical supplies, and make sure that we have a diversified supply chain there.

My bill would add those items to the Defense Production Act as a national security matter and would ask the president to produce a strategy around that.

Here, he would assess those supply chains. How much is already in the United States? How much is in countries friendly to the United States? How dependent are we on active drug ingredients, finished drugs, medical supplies, medical devices?

And then put that strategy in place so that we don’t have the situation that I believe we had this first quarter of 2020 when the tide went out and we found out we really didn’t have any swimming trunks on when the water receded.

We really didn’t have the kind of thoughtful planning I believe that we should have had in this area of strategic medical supplies and pharmaceuticals.

Del Guidice: On that note and talking about being strategic when it comes to our medical supply chain, why is it so important to be less reliant on foreign manufacturers like China?

Hill: If your supply chain is in an authoritarian regime, not a market economy, economy with a lot of government intrusion in it, it means it’s not as transparent. It means it’s not as market-driven as say we are in the U.S.

And while the FDA-regulated pharmaceutical ingredients are spread around the world, as Tori has outlined in her great work for Heritage, you still have these potentials for log jams.

I think the point is to have a strategic study as a part of the Defense Production Act so that we really know where we are, where do we need to be, and how we could ramp up production here more easily. Instead of it being a mystery, which it was as we got into this pandemic.

Del Guidice: One of the provisions in your legislation is … that [the president] could provide incentives to ensure the availability of medical articles that are used for essential national defense. What do you think some of these incentives that you outlined could look like?

Hill: Well, they might be R&D [research and development] incentives. They might be locational incentives to bring a production back to the United States. They might be purchase order incentives from the national stockpile or from [the Defense Department], for example.

There might be a variety of things and I think that’s what would be good in the bill is to have the executive branch study those best ideas and put forward recommendations.

Del Guidice: We’ve heard some people say and talk about how decreasing dependence on China for pharmaceuticals could create a risk that would cause disruptions or shortages that would jeopardize different supply chains or different accesses to medication. What is your response when people talk about those kinds of concerns?

Hill: That’s why the SAVE Act that I proposed is not China-specific. It’s asking the president to have a strategic approach for national security purposes to our pharmaceutical and medical supply chain for that particular purpose.

We want to take advantage of innovation around the world. We want to take advantage of manufacturing capacity around the world. So it’s not meant to disrupt that supply chain, but it is meant to strategically make sure that we have redundant supply chains and critical ingredients.

I think the most recent thing when you look in the press here over the last few weeks, you see that 100% of Ibuprofen for whatever reason is located in China. That would be a non-diverse supply chain of something that’s a very common ingredient in every household in America.

So those are the kinds of things that one would think through and offer a strategy that took into account all the potential manufacturing capacity around the world where it’s located, and we do this now in national security-related aviation production, technology production.

So this is not unusual. I think what’s unusual is that we didn’t have it done previously.

Del Guidice: Another provision that’s in your bill allows the president explicit authority, as you’ve talked about, to use the DPA to protect supply chains by allowing entities to increase the security of supply chains in their activities. And if this were to happen, practically speaking, what would that look like down the road?

Hill: I think if you have a strategy of having redundant supply chains, then you’d have the ability to switch production from one country, one plant to another more easily.