> Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s Sandia National Laboratory (in Albuquerque NM USA) began building the capacity to design, fab, and test IC’s at scale (packaging was handled by Fairchild and Allied Signal).

We need more of this kind of thing, generally: government agencies building up in-house technical capability, instead of outsourcing everything to contractors.

For instance: there should be a government-controlled pharmaceutical manufacturer of last resort. The clear benefits would be to provide extra capacity and prevent things like Martin Shkreli's scams with Retrophin/Turing Pharmaceuticals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli#Thiola_price_hi...).