EMERGENCY PRICE CONTROL ACT 56 Stat. 23 (1942)

The most important independent administrative agency set up during world war ii was the Office of Price Administration (OPA). The agency began studying plans for rationing and price fixing in April 1941 without benefit of statutory authority. The Emergency Price Control Act of 1942 gave the OPA official status, with broad powers for price regulation and a price administrator to make the act effective. The administrator was given broad discretion to supervise and fix prices and rent ceilings, combat profiteering and speculation, expedite defense purchases without excessive waste, and place limits on wages and other income from production. From 1942 to 1945, the OPA approached complete regulation of prices and rents. To prevent sellers and landlords from seeking injunctions in state or federal courts against enforcement of particular price orders, the statute directed all determinations of the legality of price orders, including their constitutionality, to an emergency court of appeals, established in Washington, D.C.

Unlike most wartime agencies, the OPA was challenged in the courts. The Supreme Court was supportive, upholding in yakus v. united states (1944) those portions of the EPCA delegating to the OPA power to fix prices; in Bowles v. Willingham (1944) the Court upheld an OPA rent-fixing directive. Yakus also upheld the channeling of issues of legality to the Emergency Court of Appeals, which had the effect of requiring other courts to enforce price orders irrespective of the question of their lawfulness. In Steuart and Bros. v. Bowles (1944), the system of "indirect sanctions," whereby the OPA imposed its controls on the economy without formal resort to the judicial process, was sustained; the Court refused to interfere with the principal coercive device whereby various executive agencies gave practical force to their directives.

Paul L. Murphy
(1986)

Bibliography

United States Office of Temporary Controls 1947 The Beginnings of OPA. Washington, D.C.: Office of Temporary Controls.