One sounds incapable from a skill perspective, the other is incapable from a market perspective. I’ll take the later over the former any day.
That's how this goes from being a market issue to a skill issue.
It baffles me that this wasn’t made more explicit? That seems to be the root cause of the failure.
Note that a federal jobs program has something like 60-80% support by voters across all political spectrums in the USA.
Just because a foreign glove manufacturer has to comply with the same safety/quality standards for their product only scratches the surface. Domestic companies also have to operate compliant with regulations regarding hiring, real estate, safety, finance, and many more.
To be clear, a lot of those regulations (most of them!) achieve good things and should be preserved! Working/environmental/low-corruption conditions in the US (though they could be better) are often superior to those same conditions in the places we import from precisely because of those regulations. But not all regulations (even those with good goals) are effective, others are not worth the burden, and all of them in aggregate do directly contribute to domestic manufacturing loss. It’s a hard problem that others (e.g. Pahlka) have written about much more wisely than I can.
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.
Oh, and you also need to secure stable supply chains.
(We may be in trouble here)