President Trump’s top trade and manufacturing policy adviser took aim at medical supply brokers trying to sell critical items at vastly inflated prices.
“Brokers are offering millions of items, whether they are goggles, masks, or whatever, and you go through three different brokers, tracing to a warehouse in [Los Angeles] that’s allegedly got ten million masks, and they want to charge you seven times what they cost,” White House Director of Trade and Industrial Policy Peter Navarro said during a coronavirus press briefing on Sunday. “That’s price gouging,” he added.
“A message to the hoarders: If you’ve got any large quantities of materials that this country needs right now, get them to market or get them to us, we’ll pay you a fair price,” Navarro said. “But if you don’t do that, we’re going to come for you and make sure that doesn’t happen in this country.”
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Navarro said that stopping brokers selling much-needed supplies far above their normal price would be a “good use of the Defense Production Act,” which allows the president to force manufacturers to expand production of resources in short supply, among other powers.
Trump has resisted calls to directly invoke the Defense Production Act in response to the coronavirus outbreak.
Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Peter Gaynor said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday that state officials should purchase needed items on the open market, and the agency would reimburse them.
Contending with these shortages, some governors have called for federal intervention.
“We are competing against other states. In some ways, we’re savaging other states,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at a press conference Sunday, calling price gouging, “a tremendous problem” and saying the White House should nationalize certain industries in response.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, compared the situation to the “wild west” on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. States are competing against one another and against other countries for medical supplies, Pritzker said, and they are overpaying for them as a result.
