Biden Administration Lets Another PPE Factory Languish, Leaving U.S. Dependent on China

By KRISTINA WONG

The Biden administration is letting yet another factory languish that was meant to provide America with critical medical supplies instead of relying on China in the event of another national emergency.

• A factory that the federal government invested nearly $100 million in to produce rubber nitrile gloves is sitting unfinished and idle, despite the factory’s groundbreaking in March 2022, the Baltimore Banner reported.

  The state-of-the-art factory in Baltimore County, Maryland, which was once used by Bethlehem Steel, was aiming to draw in $350 million in public and private investment, create 2,000 new jobs, and mark the return of manufacturing to Sparrows Point within a year.

  However, the factory has yet to produce a single glove, the factory sits unfinished, and “the feds are distancing themselves,” according to the report.

  The company contracted to build the factory, United Safety Technology, needs more money from the federal government, and is unable to compete with China, which under the Biden administration has become the top supplier of rubber gloves.

  “I think this is a national story, to be honest with you,” Dan Izhaky, founder of United Safety Technology, said.

  The Biden administration has also turned its back on a nearly finished state-of-the-art rubber plant in Virginia, despite the state’s top two Democrat senators asking the administration for help.

  During the pandemic, the federal government granted $123 million to Blue Star NBR for the plant and an adjacent glove-making factory, but with inflation and the cost of energy and building materials up, CEO Scott Maier said he needs $60 million to hook it up to utilities and $170 million to build the glove factory — which he said he never got funding for. In May 2023, the Biden Department of Defense (DOD) told him the contract was over, and Maier would have to win a new contract, or find private funding.

  During the COVID pandemic, which started in Wuhan, China, and spread to the rest of the world, killing millions worldwide, American hospitals and frontline workers found themselves scrambling for masks, gloves, ventilators, and basic medical supplies. Much of the needed supplies were being produced overseas in Asia, making them difficult to obtain. In addition, the Strategic National Stockpile had been depleted by the Obama administration during the 2009 swine flu crisis, and never replenished.

  The Trump administration stood up a massive effort to jumpstart production of the critical medical supplies in America. The Departments of Defense and Health and Human Services were tasked with domestic production of PPE, pharmaceutical ingredients, and other critical supplies, and awarded $16 billion in contracts to companies for 87 different manufacturing projects.

  However, the Biden administration has distanced itself from the projects. Now, China — which had only a small fraction of the rubber glove market at the beginning of the pandemic — is on its way to dominating it.

  As Breitbart News’s Matthew Boyle reported, since Biden took the White House in 2021, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has rapidly seized market share for U.S. imports of nitrile medical gloves.

  Data from the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) showed that in 2019 the U.S. relied on China for about 14.2 percent of such medical gloves. Domestic manufacturing accounted for zero percent, but other countries, such as Malaysia, Thailand, and more — nations far friendlier to the United States than China — made up 85.7 percent of imports.

  However, since Biden took office, China increased its share of imports of medical gloves to the United States to 26.8 percent, while the other countries dropped to 73.1 percent. Two years later, in 2023, China increased its share of imports of medical gloves to the United States to 44.15 percent—while the other countries dropped to just 53.6 percent. In 2023, thanks to a program started during the pandemic under Trump but stymied under Biden, the U.S. made around 2.22 percent of medical gloves used domestically.

  “At this pace, if nothing changes, the U.S. will be dependent on China for approximately 60 percent of medical gloves used domestically in 2024,” Boyle wrote.

  During the pandemic, the federal government awarded six companies $574 million to produce the rubber gloves worn by doctors, nurses, and other technicians, and another $123 million for the proposed nitrile rubber factory in Virginia. United Safety Technology won a $96.1 million federal grant to manufacture the rubber gloves, and raised an additional $250 million in private investment, according to the Baltimore Banner. Yet, only two of the six awardees are making gloves today.

  Maier said it is not just the rubber glove factories that are suffering.

  “If you look at the $17 billion that went out, there’s got to be probably 50 or 60 other companies that have these facilities that are probably 80, 90 percent complete but actually aren’t producing anything,” Maier told Breitbart News in an interview last month. “And again we need to make the critical items that we need here in the U.S. or at least have a portion so we never have a situation where we can’t get these critical items.”

  Maier said when they appealed to the Biden administration, their requests fell on deaf ears.

  “When we talk to the administration…they say, ‘Well, we want the private sector to come in.’ Well, unfortunately, when the government comes in and jumpstarts a project like this, it crowds out the private sector. And then the private sector looks in and says, ‘Well, it looks like the government’s really abandoned you. They’re not giving you money to finish your factory and they’re also not even buying the product that’s coming out.’”

  Tinglong Day, a professor of operations management and business analytics at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, told the Baltimore Banner, that now that the pandemic is over, few people seem to care about subsidizing American-made gloves. “It was a feel-good story at that time,” he said.

  But Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a watchdog organization that researches government subsidies, said one thing the government could do is enforce that federal agencies buy American-made gloves, which would ensure a small buy steady demand for a domestic industry.

  Izhaky said he is still holding out hope, and like the rubber plant factory, it is nearly completed.

  “We spent a lot of money building out the factory, retrofitting that facility,” he told the Baltimore Banner. “The equipment is in there.”