type: timeline_event
President Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to address a nationwide infant formula shortage triggered by the February 2022 recall and shutdown of Abbott Nutrition's Sturgis, Michigan manufacturing facility — the single largest formula plant in the United States. Abbott controlled approximately 40 percent of the domestic infant formula market, and the closure of one plant was sufficient to create a national emergency affecting millions of families. The DPA invocation directed suppliers to prioritize formula manufacturers over other customers for critical ingredients and required the U.S. Department of Defense to facilitate Operation Fly Formula, using military aircraft to airlift formula from overseas producers to American consumers.
The crisis laid bare decades of unchecked market consolidation in the infant formula industry. Just four companies — Abbott, Mead Johnson (Reckitt Benckiser), Nestlé, and Perrigo — controlled virtually the entire U.S. formula market. Federal procurement policies through the WIC program, which provided formula to roughly half of all infants in the country, had inadvertently accelerated this consolidation by awarding exclusive state contracts to single manufacturers, further concentrating market power. The Food and Drug Administration had identified safety violations at Abbott's Sturgis plant months before the recall but had been slow to act, and the agency's chronic underfunding of food safety inspections meant that warning signs went unaddressed until bacterial contamination was linked to infant hospitalizations and deaths.
The spectacle of the world's wealthiest nation invoking wartime emergency powers to feed its infants underscored the dangerous fragility created by monopolistic market structures. Operation Fly Formula ultimately transported millions of pounds of formula from Europe and Australia on military cargo planes — a logistical response necessitated entirely by the failure of antitrust enforcement and food safety regulation. The crisis prompted bipartisan congressional scrutiny of market concentration in essential goods, though structural reforms to prevent similar single-point-of-failure vulnerabilities in critical supply chains remained largely unaddressed. Abbott resumed production at the Sturgis plant in June 2022, only to shut down again weeks later due to flooding, further illustrating the risks of concentrating production capacity in a single facility.