It's Brian Lehrer, and this is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios.

It's Monday, March 23rd.

With us now for a Washington take on coronavirus developments, Susan Page, Washington

Bureau Chief for USA Today.

Hi, Susan.

Welcome back to WNYC.

Hey, Brian.

It's good to be with you.

So let me just dive right into the central life and death question right now, which is how much

can private industry on its own ramp up production of masks, ventilators, and other

life-saving medical equipment? President Trump keeps resisting calls from New York and even elsewhere,

I'm seeing other governors, Democrat and Republican, who have the most dire shortages, who want him to intervene with industry

to order more production under the Defense Production Act.

The president last night said he's trying to avoid the heavy hand of government.

What's his policy at this point?

And have you seen good answers from economists or anything else, anyone else, as to whether the profit motive is enough to get companies to do what's needed?

Well, there are a couple things that invoking the Defense Production Act would do.

It would allow the government to coordinate this for one thing. One thing we're

hearing from some businesses is that they are a little at sea about what exactly they could

do to be most helpful, even if they want to be helpful. So under this law, the federal government

could say, make this, not that. The other thing that the law would allow the federal

government to do is to decide where scarce resources go. So you could direct it to places like

...