But further down it says that the cost was double and factories couldn't get buyers.
These are very different failure modes, and speak to very different solutions.
Shorter expirations are managed by constantly selling the old to the domestic industry and purchasing new, like China does for grain and frozen meat while simultaneously being able to keep the market more stable by selling high and buying low. Switzerland has a lot of stockpiles, even including coffee[0], which the companies also go through FIFO.
0: "The 15 big Swiss coffee retailers, roasters and importers, such as Nestlé, are required by law to store heaps of raw coffee. Together, these mandated coffee reserves amount to about 15,000 tonnes—enough for three months’ consumption. The government finances the storage costs through a levy on imports of coffee. All 15 companies are in favour of maintaining the coffee reserve—as long as they are paid for it." Economist 2019
But a year before COVID, these warehouses were shut down, as the stockpiles were old, and needed a refresh, and politicians didnt see the need to spend tens of millions on new stockpiles.
The has happened several times over the last 100 years.
It baffles me that this wasn’t made more explicit? That seems to be the root cause of the failure.
That's how this goes from being a market issue to a skill issue.
Which makes you wonder why the government thought it was a feasible investment or if they didn’t care and hand waved it with ‘national security’.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040615/what-are-eco...
There is so much domain expertise that exists in production that is not documented, because who has time for writing documentation when your floor is on fire.
But if writing documentation is something free and can be automated (maybe from the company internal comms), maybe we have a chance?
Interestingly govspending says only $8.7 million of the $10 million award has been outlayed but I guess it's possible it just doesn't have the outlay info for the $123 million contract?
I think the contract type is a 'firm fixed-price definitive contract' but what happens when the contractor doesn't manage to create the production capability in the contract?
I found a FOIA request on muckrock[3] but it didn't seem to have anything related to the contract in terms of penalties.
[1][$123.1 million] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_FA850521C0005_970...
https://www.highergov.com/contract/FA850521C0005/
https://g2xchange.com/app/awards/contracts/CONT_AWD_FA850521...
[2][$10 million] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_75A50525C00001_75...
[3] https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/con...
Should the US make medical gloves?
If the next pandemic is 50% deadly, not being able to make gloves is surely the canary in the coal mine proving we wouldn't be able to make any other PPE.
And no country can rely on another if it's do or die. Other blocs will keep to themselves.
Who cares about silly stuff like health emergencies, the climate catastrophe or war. Number must go up!
Markets will make you climb a hill ignoring it ends on a cliff end
Not only are many individual agents aligned with short term interests they often either can't because they will be pushed out by short term thinkers or literally benefit from net harm to all. America mostly being composed of the rich not the masses voting with their wallets.
The problem is it's an optimizing function for the rich getting richer, not for the good of society, not for reducing human suffering, not even, y'know, the survival of the human race.
Also, "climate catastrophe" is not a thing.
It takes a deep ideological commitment to close ones eyes to the reality in front of us.
Our planet is literally dying.
The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]
Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound...
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w
[3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l...
[4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...
Obviously the planet won't die. The current biodiversity and the civilization depending on it however might.
In my country, streets are literally melting now, because they were never built for temperatures this high. We had 5000 heat deaths within 2 weeks. Temperatures never seen before in almost 250 years of consistent measurements of weather and temperature.
It's bad. And the data is available for everybody, including you, to see.
E.g. here, they've got tons of raw data available too (german): https://www.dwd.de/DE/leistungen/zeitreihen/zeitreihen.html
Don't know what you see there - but it sure does look like an exponential curve, doesn't it?
But I have a feeling you knew what I meant and are just being deliberately obtuse.
The Gaia hypothesis is science fiction compared to climate catastrophe, which is real.
I always see catastrophizing and autarkist-coded takes like this which imply the US is a house of cards because we don't manufacture everything under the sun at all times. You have to realize that preparing for a doomsday scenario like 50% fatality rate pandemic has a cost that someone foots the bill for. Even in 2020 with a buffoon running the country, we still reacted very quickly and developed multiple vaccines to combat a novel virus (yes, the response was bungled in other ways but I digress)... people, markets, etc. are adaptable and we will figure it out.
It's not like you need a metric ton of it to produce a box of gloves.
I am not sure what you are getting at, continuously spending money on cost ineffective gloves just in case there is a problem sometime, including the upfront investment.
The scale of the storage? We have 6000 hospitals in the US. which would have to store about 2 million gloves a piece if you decentralized it. The storage space would be about 2 10x10x10 cubes in each location, probably varying dramatically by hospital size. Of course that is just proper hospitals, we have many many more medical facilities that use them. I don't see storage being a problem.
So what is the scale we are talking here? A complete 6 month supply would be half the cost, which still seems excessive. And this is a pandemic scenario we are talking about that uses a lot of gloves, not a national security concern where we would not have that much additional use.
For those who haven't seen the video, YouTuber Destin Sandlin ("Smarter every day") tried to build a grill scrubber using 100% materials from the US and failed.
US manufacturing is expensive because wages are high, but also because we focus on the high end work that pays more . Even the small machine shops I used 10 years ago for small scale production runs are no longer interested in doing any small batch work. They have more contract work from big companies than they can handle, and the big companies pay more and have higher order quantities.
If you’re a shop or a factory in the US you’re never going to take some small orders for a grill brush from some YouTuber who doesn’t have any expertise in marketing grill brushes. Everyone is going to turn that order down because there’s no money or future in it, but there’s plenty of better work that pays better from companies who want to keep using your services in the future.
He set out to get "100% made in the USA", settled for "no part made in China", and couldn't even get that. That definitely feels like a failure of the US manufacturing industry.
The US manufacturing industry moved on to better paying, more stable contracts because they could.
They have no incentive to do niche things for small time YouTubers who won’t be generating repeat business.
Even the small machine shops I know now have more high paying work than they can handle. They’re just interested in doing some niche temporary work in a race to the bottom with another country that can pay workers a fraction as much and ignore all of the health and safety regulations.
For 500m i'll make all the gloves you want, we can slap as many X's on the size as you desire/require.
Let me know. Waiting for your call.
Sometimes, there are brief moments when technical people are given the control they need to deliver... But after a few years, they are again subjugated to MBAs in suits again and the capacity is lost.
I see this constantly nowadays. As a technical person, there are many companies/roles where the constraints set you up for failure from the beginning. I've delivered some very complex projects but I've also worked at jobs on far simpler projects where I knew since day 1 that the project wouldn't pan out due to counter-productive technical constraints being imposed... but you know the company is well positioned in the financial system and that the outcome won't matter; so you take the job anyway. You still get the high pay and the prestige from the brand name. There are many companies like this where people seem to keep failing upwards and stock price always goes up.
We see it everywhere. Bad companies making bad decisions keep surviving, and actually the vast majority of companies are like this.
One implication is that MBAs in suits that make bad decisions are actually right and their decisions are not bad. The other implication is that there is no free market, no meritocracy and the truth is, game was rigged from the start.
Edit: I should add that most of this is anegdotal evidence and a general feeling I have. It is not a very powerful argument I'm making.
The market punishes incompetent companies.
Just being aware that the market rewards competent companies is not enough to magically turn companies competent.
For example, about a month ago, I saw a video about people farming frogs in China... To collect secretions for medical use. At first I thought WTF. But then they mentioned how much it sells for and I thought "Wow. We have a lot of cane toads here everywhere, it would be a great business to do here." I actually started thinking of doing this... This is really out there for me because I'm a software engineer; but I started seriously considering this. But guess what? I did my research and turns out it's illegal to do it in my country (Australia) because the frog secretions would be considered an illicit substance and you need to go through some expensive process to obtain a license. Yes, you need a license to farm frogs...
A few weeks back, I read news about someone who got arrested for farming cockroaches (as reptile food for zoos)... It's like all the entry-point business opportunities have become illegal.
Every time I heard of a case like this where some really good niche business opportunity is illegal in Australia, I asked my AI if this practice is legal in China and the answer is almost always yes.
The other day, I was watching a documentary about Philippines and I saw a kind of makeshift resort built literally on top of a coral reef. Really amazing looking. They seemed to be getting good reviews and actually making money... This would NEVER be allowed in my country. At best, you could purchase a ship for millions of dollars then apply for expensive licenses, then you'd have limits on how many people you can take at a time, etc... So many constraints and regulations. Such artificially high capital requirements. It would be a worse experience and less profitable; and you'd have to be filthy rich just to get a chance to engage in that highly constrained, mediocre business activity.
My brother had a neighbour build a crematorium next door in NZ; not an industrial or rural area, just the suburbs, no permits, no consultation, no notification. Very entrepreneurial. They got shut down but the flip side of "you can just do things" is surprises like a plume of smoke and the smell of burning corpses when you step outside.
So anyone who just goes “grr, regulation bad”, I can’t take seriously. If you have specific examples of regulations that are objectively bad, and should be removed, that’s fine, but the examples you cited protect something else, and ignoring that is intellectually dishonest at best, and blatantly partisan at worst.
I was kind of able to read that on my Android phone, but something on the page made panning really janky so I gave up.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/decline-and-fall-of-the-a...
On the other hand the US is still very good at bombing small, poor countries...