The fact is that government can’t do anything well so if you enjoy complaining, your local, county, state and federal governments will never let you down! Mayor of LA didn’t cancel their marathon a month ago, mayor of NY was telling people to go out to eat at a Chinese restaurant around the same time, so to point the finger at just the feds for being short sighted, is short sighted, in retrospect everyone dropped the ball. Which is easy to say in hindsight.
I sure hope when all is said and done, we rethink our supply chain. Given our dependence on Asia, I don’t know how quickly we could have ramped up PPE production even if our government was run by perfect individuals many naively think exist. I guarantee that even US manufacturers use foreign sourced material to assemble their product. A 3M mask likely has foreign made filtering material even if it’s assembled here.
I’m more than a little biased on the subject, I lost a job I’d had for 14 years when my then employer started moving production offshore. Shut down plants in US and Canada, put a lot of my friends and respected colleagues out of work too. Happened at thousands of companies over the last 2 decades.
One can hope one good change will be a rethinking of this issue and shifting production of critical items back here.