Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) wants President Biden to invoke the Defense Production Act to force an aluminum plant in Missouri to stay open, but he opposes a bill that would fund actual defense production, some of which would occur in Missouri.
On January 25, Hawley demanded that Biden prevent an aluminum plant that announced it would be closing from doing so. He cited national security as part of the justification, saying that the Department of Defense “has deemed aluminum a strategic material of interest.”
This is not a power that Biden actually has. As Eric Boehm pointed out at Reason, thank goodness for that. No one should want to live in a country where the president orders specific factories to work.
And it is peculiar to see a Republican senator urging Biden to abuse the Defense Production Act, something Biden has done repeatedly during his time in office. Senators should be seeking to curtail, not encourage, an overreaching executive.
Hawley today said, “In the early morning when nobody was watching the Senate voted to plow another $60 billion of your money into Ukraine.”
The bill in question passed 70–29. If all but one senator voted on the bill, it’s hard to say nobody was watching. And aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan has probably been the most discussed issue in Congress for at least the past month. This wasn’t worked out in secret.
“Not a penny for Missouri,” Hawley said of the bill, but that’s not true. First, St. Charles, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis, is home to a Boeing plant that makes Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), a type of smart bomb, that the U.S. is supplying to Ukraine and Israel. The bill the Senate passed includes funding for replenishing weapons used by Ukraine and Israel in their ongoing wars. The funding is not broken down by type of weapon, but some of it will almost certainly go toward JDAMs. In 2020, Hawley included funding to procure JDAMs in a list of “direct benefits to Missouri” from the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). By Hawley’s own standard, spending on JDAMs benefits Missouri.
Second, the bill the Senate passed includes funding for submarine production. Missouri is home to 23 submarine suppliers. In the 2020 NDAA statement, Hawley also included “additional funding for the Navy’s Virginia-class submarine program” in the list of “direct benefits to Missouri.” The Senate bill passed today includes $200 million for the Virginia class and $1.955 billion for the new Columbia class of submarines. One company has already committed to making parts for the Columbia class at its facility in High Ridge, Mo.
“The Republican Party has a choice to make. It can be the party of the War Machine or the party of the American people. Not both,” Hawley said. In 2019, when listing the ways in which the NDAA benefited Missouri, Hawley specifically mentioned that spending on new aircraft would go to projects “built by Boeing in St. Louis.” Boeing is one of the largest defense contractors. Was Hawley supporting the “War Machine” in 2019? Were the American people harmed by the production of F/A-18s that Hawley was bragging about then, the same model of plane that has been used to carry out strikes in Yemen in response to attacks on American sailors?
Hawley’s current position on defense production appears to be that the president should have unilateral power to order specific facilities to make specific things related to defense, but defense legislation with funding approved by Congress for weapons production in the U.S. is a no-go. Workers in Missouri’s defense industry are probably scratching their heads.