Think in quantities. Hospitals in normal times don't consume the number of masks you'd need to stockpile for a pandemic situation.

At least where I am (Canada) hospitals all buy through a couple of “buying groups”, so it’s not a bad way to get rid of lots of stock quickly.

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?”

Possibly. But either stockpile or product them locally so production can be ramped up for local populous in the time of a pandemic. And make sending masks overseas illegal.

Too many people were buying up shops of marks and sending them back to China. That hurts us even more.

A ton of masks used in the US were assembled in China, because they have the manufacturing capacity and labor cost advantage, even if they were built with meltblown filters produced in the US.

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.

We can invent and manufactur a bomber that evades radar. Mask are 5 to 10 orders of magnitude less involved.

The only responsible excuse is incompetence or negligence. We, the USA, were completely unprepared.

incompetence AND negligence