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.
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’.
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...
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.
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!
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.