N95s are used in many industries, and it’s a liquid market. Not hard to call up a big industrial distributor and say “hey, we have these masks that expire in 1yr, want to have a sale?”
Too many people were buying up shops of marks and sending them back to China. That hurts us even more.
If the goal is pandemic preparedness, it would probably be most efficient to just build and mothball production lines, doing limited runs yearly to exercise the machinery.
The government has more than enough land and warehouse space.
As far as I understand, none of the components (or machinery to produce them) are particularly cutting edge... just limited because they were sized for pre-pandemic sales volume.
The only responsible excuse is incompetence or negligence. We, the USA, were completely unprepared.
“Shelf-life” on non-perishable goods is highly conservative and often regulated by profit motive. Millions of N95 and P95 respirators were destroyed shortly before the pandemic due to “shelf life” and yet would have been a god send compared to having nothing or treating active COVID cases with a t-shirt or bandana over your face as happened in many US hospitals.
Proper planning could have rotated stock to maintain shelf life, slightly less proper planning could have realized the sheer stupidity of destroying working strategic materials due to an arbitrary and made up number.
This is Respiratory Pandemic 101. It's a threshold no expert should be tolerant of and/or should fail. Any other excuse is propaganda.
The bigger issue is the sheer cost of preparation against an exponentially-reproducing threat.
All other disasters can be prepared for with state of the art gear because they are, by nature, limited. Ergo, a limit amount of gear can be rapidly transported to location and will suffice.
In contrast, a pandemic requires "multiple for every single person" levels of stock. Which is outside most capitalist supply bohnds (i.e. no one can even produce that much stock).