WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) - The Trump administration is using a Korean War-era law to redirect to the United States surgical masks manufactured by 3M in other countries as part of a heated pressure campaign to force the Minnesota company to cut off sales of surgical masks abroad.

The policy is a significant expansion of the US government's reach and a reversal of President Donald Trump's hesitant use of the Defence Production Act, which allows the administration to force a company to prioritise the US government over competing orders.

But in this case, the administration is invoking the law to compel 3M to send to the US masks made in factories overseas and to stop exporting masks the company manufactures in America. Those moves, some trade and legal experts fear, could backfire and prompt foreign governments to clamp down on desperately needed medical necessities destined for the US.

On Friday (April 3) evening, the Trump administration issued an executive order directing federal emergency management and health officials to use the law's authority to preserve respirators, surgical masks and surgical gloves for domestic use.

In an accompanying statement, Mr Trump criticised "wartime profiteers", which he said included speculators, warehouse operators and some well-established distributors with the ability to "unscrupulously" divert inventory from hospitals and state governments to foreign purchasers that are willing to pay a premium.

Mr Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser who has been put in charge of policy related to the act, levelled a broadside on Friday against 3M, all but accusing it of disloyalty.

"While hundreds of other large American multinationals are stepping up with pride and patriotism, 3M remains an outlier and its propaganda war must stop," he said in an interview, adding that the company was "operating like a sovereign profit-maximising nation internationally".

In a statement on Friday, 3M defended its actions and said the administration had also asked it to stop exporting respirators made in the United States to Canada and Latin America - a request it said carried "significant humanitarian implications" for people in those areas.

Mr Navarro denied the administration had made that demand, but he said the White House was using the wartime act to provide "all of the N95 respirators it can possibly muster to prevent Americans from dying".