America's inability to make nitrile gloves at scale is relevant because it reveals the loss of (and subsequent failure to rebuild) industrial capabilities policymakers claim they desperately want to restore.
You can't hide behind a hypothetical counterfactual of "we would make them if we wanted to, but it's not worth our time" anymore. The pandemic was the ultimate acid test. The gloves were strategically important and highly profitable.
We wanted to. We tried. We funded it. We prioritized it. We STILL couldn't do it. When healthcare workers' lives were literally on the line amidst a pandemic, with enormous resources in the richest country on earth and extremely favorable political and economic tailwinds behind this one objective, the U.S. was unable to recreate and scale a domestic PPE supply chain. ...and six years later, still can't.
850M dollars of gov't money spent in an effort to remedy this, yet 99% of the gloves are still imported and the domestic flagship projects are failed or stalled. If it's important, own the failure, not pretend you don't want it in the first place. It's true that the U.S. retains strong manufacturing capacity in some critical segments.
It's also true that the US has lost capabilities across a much wider range of supply chains, and recent attempts to rebuild them have exposed just how hard that process really is. In the case of the gloves, it exposed how difficult it is to organize capital, procurement, and long-term political will behind a low-margin strategic industry, even when everyone agrees it's important. That's a serious goddamn problem.
You have to abandon this childlike view of manufacturing, that industrial capacity is something you order off the menu at Chipotle when you have an appetite for it. "If we wanted to make gloves, we'd make gloves, and if we wanted to make batteries, we'd make batteries, but we choose to make semis and jet engines because we're the best and they're the best durr hurr."
Competitive industrial ecosystems depend on a whole constellation of productive factors that are hard to build, easy to lose, and incredibly hard to rebuild from scratch, once they're gone. *Especially* when they require consistent political will and patient, disciplined capital.
For anyone paying attention, that lesson from the gloves is being repeated in many other important segments, from transformers, to shipbuilding, to critical minerals, to power infrastructure for AI data centers. Again, the efforts to fix these issues enjoy very favorable tailwinds, yet it's not enough.
Critical gaps remain, although governments, manufacturers, investors, utilities, and hospitals are super interested in closing them, which is why it's so uncomfortable that they've not been successful.
Oh, and let's be clear here, Mr. Royal "We". You don't build jet engines. GE Aerospace does. You don't manufacture semiconductors. TSMC Arizona does. You write blogs. You host podcasts. You yap on social media for updoots.
The country is still full of engineers and technicians and machinists and toolmakers and construction workers all playing a part in these highly specialized industrial ecosystems that took decades to build. The people responsible for these efforts tend to have a clearer understanding of how difficult industrial capacity is to build, maintain, and finance. Maybe try talking to them more, and talking to social media a little less.
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