“In the past, we've mostly seen the government taking shares in companies or mandating production of certain items really only in two kinds of settings. One is during wartime, and the other is during a serious financial or other kind of crisis like COVID… What we're seeing today is where it's being used basically in peacetime with no real end in sight.”
The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition · US Politics · October 2026
Harrell asked how new the "new command economy" really is, given Truman's seizure of the steel mills during the Korean War and decades of the Defense Production Act. Deeks says the tools have precedents, but past uses were tied to wars or emergencies.
Transcript
kind of thing. It's also interesting hearing you
…Court said he couldn't do it. Like, how much of this is actually new versus kind of an expansion of things that we either have been doing for many years, but are just building up or maybe had done at earlier periods in our history, but had stopped doing for a couple of decades and are now reviving.
So I think some of this is different in kind, and some I would say is different in quality. I know you've actually written a great piece on this, and I hope it's out for public consumption. As you say, there are clearly historical precedents for the U.S. government exercising some aspects of what we'd probably call industrial policy. And as you just said, the defense protocol. Production Act has been on the books for a long time. It's been renewed periodically. But in the past, we've mostly seen the government taking shares in companies or mandating production of certain items, really only in two kinds of settings. One is during wartime, and the other is during a serious financial or other kind of crisis like COVID that really impacted the economy. Steel seizure, which is one of Kristen's and my favorite cases, is of course, you know, the U.S. government seizing steel mills to avoid a labor strike, which would have, in the executive's view, compromised the flow of steel for military, for the military fighting that was happening in Korea. So that kind of involvement in a supply chain, not entirely novel, but I think used in different…
want to jump in on that, Ashley, just real quick, because I think that is there's some interesting history there that I have heard in some interviews I've done with former Treasury officials, because I think that's actually was quite deliberate. I was talking to a former Treasury official for a…
I agree on the seeing in other industries too. And, you know, that makes sense at some level from the government's perspective at the time, thinking about its own capacity, thinking about where the expertise lay, sort of what's the shortest point between A and B. But I think that was probably done…
Actually, you brought up the way this is spread to exports. Controls, the way this is spreading. Do you think of the new command economy as something that is limited to a handful of sectors? We're really talking semiconductors, maybe critical minerals. We see a lot of like the investment deals in…
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