A 85-foot-tall, dark-gray building stands in southern Virginia, surrounded by grassy fields and rolling blue mountains. This brand-new chemical plant was set up during the pandemic to produce a special type of synthetic rubber that’s needed to make medical exam gloves, the kind used everyday by doctors and nurses.

But so far, this factory has produced nothing.

About 340 miles northeast, in Maryland, another brand-new factory sits idle and unfinished. This one was designed to take that kind of synthetic rubber and transform it into medical gloves. It’s a 735,000-square-foot building full of equipment, but the machines inside of it have not been fully set up.

Zero gloves have been made.

Farther north, a glove factory in New Hampshire acquired four high-speed production lines, so it could start churning out medical gloves quickly. But those lines have not been completely assembled.

That company recently laid off over 100 workers.

Together, these glove-manufacturing projects got about $290 million in public funding, part of a roughly $1.5-billion investment made by the federal government since the start of the pandemic to boost American production of medical masks, gowns, and gloves, plus the raw materials needed to make them.

The goal was to reduce the reliance on imports from Asia and to help prevent dangerous shortages of these essentials from happening again during future health crises.

But a group of manufacturers says that the effort has stalled — and that some American companies trying to make personal protective equipment (also known as PPE) are facing financial circumstances that threaten them with ruin.

“The commitment the U.S. Government made just three years ago appears to have been abandoned,” executives recently wrote to lawmakers in Congress.

Greg Burel, who directed the federal Strategic National Stockpile for a dozen years, told NPR that having some PPE manufacturing in the United States is “vital” for preparing for any kind of event that would break the normal supply chains and leave countries around the world vying for these critical items.

Asked if the nation was better off now, versus a few years ago, in terms of having reliable access to PPE in a global emergency, Burel said, “No. I don’t think so.”

“What the government has done is invested in this industrial base expansion,” says Burel. “But there are no other particular incentives for the U. S. healthcare marketplace, on a day-to-day basis, to buy product coming out of those expanded manufacturing capabilities.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which worked with the Department of Defense to give out grants during the pandemic, says that the efforts by the HHS have “strengthened our preparedness for future public health threats but sustaining the gains that our country has made over the last few years is difficult, important, and requires continued investment in domestic manufacturing.”

The only facility in the U.S.

A close examination of one key medical item — medical exam gloves — illustrates why manufacturing this protective gear has proven so difficult.

Over 100 billion basic exam gloves get used each year in the United States, and business executive Scott Maier says that all but a tiny fraction of them come from Asia.

Even before the pandemic, Maier dreamed of manufacturing medical gloves on U.S. soil. He figured that with automation, he could get prices low enough to compete with makers in Malaysia, which had been the world’s main glove supplier for years.

“That’s what we were trying to do,” says Maier, the CEO of a company called Blue Star NBR. “But trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to make a commodity, before the pandemic, was not an easy feat.”

As a novel coronavirus began to race around the world in 2020, however, hospitals found themselves desperately short of PPE, with doctors and nurses forced to ration masks and