Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves

Note that a federal jobs program has something like 60-80% support by voters across all political spectrums in the USA.

For an object-level example, look at the difficulties the Russians had reconstituting their industrial base in the post-apocalyptic wasteland they found themselves after the 90s. It took them a decade to figure out how to restart production of the Tu-160M bomber, and they had all the original blueprints! Likewise, for a while, we forgot how to make this "FOGBANK" substance that's somehow important for nuclear weapons.

It's all too easy to forget how to do something if you stop doing it for a while.

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

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.

Also, "climate catastrophe" is not a thing.

Any investment in such is likely to pay dividends in much less dramatic ordinary catastrophes which have occurred repeatedly and constantly.

It's probably a better investment than our military.

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.

Workers in a well ran assembly line should not have to figure out anything.

I could search for “belt jam” in outlook decades ago. Why do you see it as a difficult technical task? The info is there, nobody has the time to organize it.

With friends like the United States, China, and Russia, they’re gonna have to decide to stop coasting and for once try to move to the front of the line.

The market punishes incompetent companies.

Just being aware that the market rewards competent companies is not enough to magically turn companies competent.