CFR

700.30—Priorities and allocations in a national emergency.

(a) In the event of a national emergency, special rules may be established as needed to supplement this part, thus ensuring rapid industrial response and the timely availability of critical industrial items and facilities to meet the urgent national defense requirements, including domestic emergency preparedness requirements, of approved programs.

(1) Emergency official actions. (i) As needed, this part may be supplemented to include additional definitions to cover civilian emergency preparedness industrial items, support for essential civilian programs, and provisions for the taking of certain emergency official actions under sections §§ 700.60 through 700.63.

(ii) Emergency official actions may include:

(A) Controlling inventories of critical and scarce defense and/or emergency preparedness items;

(B) Restricting the purchase, use, or distribution of critical and scarce defense and/or emergency preparedness items, or the use of production or distribution facilities, for non-essential purposes; and

(C) Converting the production or distribution of non-essential items to the production or distribution of critical and scarce defense and/or emergency preparedness items.

(2) Allocation of critical and scarce items and facilities. (i) As needed, this part may be supplemented to establish special rules for the allocation of scarce and critical items and facilities to ensure the timely availability of these items and facilities for approved programs, and to provide for an equitable and orderly distribution of requirements for such items among all suppliers of the items. These rules may provide for the allocation of individual items or they may be broad enough to direct general industrial activity as required in support of emergency requirements.

(ii) Allocation rules (i.e., controlled materials programs) were established in response to previous periods of national security emergency such as World War II and the Korean Conflict. The basic elements of the controlled materials programs were the set-aside (the amount of an item for which a producer or supplier must reserve order book space in anticipation of the receipt of rated orders), the production directive (requires a producer to supply a specific quantity, size, shape, and type of an item within a specific time period), and the allotment (the maximum quantity of an item authorized for use in a specific program or application). These elements can be used to assure the availability of any scarce and critical item for approved programs. Currently, a set-aside applies only to metalworking machines (see § 700.31 ).

(3) In the event that certain critical items become scarce, and approved program requirements for these items cannot be met without creating a significant dislocation in the civilian market place so as to create appreciable hardship, Commerce may establish special rules under section 101(b) of the Defense Production Act to control the general distribution of such items in the civilian market.

(b) [Reserved]

Code of Federal Regulations

[63 FR 31923, June 11, 1998, as amended at 71 FR 39528, July 13, 2006]

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