It’s been said that generals always plan for the last war. And we plan for the last disaster.
The problem with an all-out effort to stockpile ventilators, masks, etc., is that they only help in certain crises. But if we prepare perfectly for the next pandemic that primarily affects the lungs, the next crisis may be a financial collapse, or a perfect 100-year storm, or a massive volcanic eruption, or a war, or a large asteroid hit, or a Carrington event… All of which we are unprepared for at a government level.
Or we could store 100,000 ventilators, only to have the next virus attack the brain or the heart or the liver and kidneys, and suddenly we’ll have warehouses of ventilators but a huge shortage of dialysis machines or heart and lung machines, and everyone will start yelling that we should have known and prepared.
The answer for a free society is not to do what closed societies do and make the government responsible for planning and carrying out disaster responses (including providing supplies), but to leverage our strength. America didn’t win WWII because it had the best generals or the best leaders or the best preparation. The U.S. won WWII because it unleashed the economic power of a free economy, and because it let businesses find their own solutions to problems and offer solutions to the government. Remember 'The Arsenal of Democracy"? That wasn’t a literal collection of weapons and equipment - it was the untapped productive ability of the U.S. economy.
What we should be doing is drafting plans to rapidly enlist the industrial capacity of the nation. For example, create an open-source ventilator design that is specifically designed to be built on existing assembly lines. Maximum use of off-the-shelf parts, 3D printed parts, etc. If there are critical materials that are only available from other countries, stockpile enough of those, but not finished machines.
You don’t have to build, warehouse and maintain thousands of ventilators if you can ramp up production of them in a week or two to supply the demand. Do the same for other disaster goods. Ensure that the U.S. industry has enough flex capacity to devote production to various disaster goods rapidly.
Also, scrap anti-gouging laws. They prevent the market from working in crisis situations, and are a really bad idea. Currently, those laws are preventing the U.S. from competing for N95 masks with countries that don’t have such laws. American companies are afraid to buy them at the current inflated prices for fear that they won’t be able to resell them on the U.S. market without running afoul of such laws. So they are being sold to foreign companies under no such restrictions.
It’s clear that the CDC and the FDA slowed down the response because their regulatory regimes prevented innovation and testing. A disaster response commission should take a pre-emptive look at which regulations might get in the way when response times have to be rapid and responses have to be flexible, and develop formal waiver programs that can be established and implemented rapidly to cut red tape when it’s needed. For example, if people need to hire crews fast to help fill sandbags for floods or help out in hospitals or whatever, they shouldn’t have to jump through weeks of paperwork to do it. If someone comes up with a test or a vaccine, it shouldn’t have to go through the same kinds of regulatory hurdles that wouldn’t be complete until the crisis was over or everyone was dead.
When you face MANY potential crises, and the future is a random walk and unpredictable, the best thing to do is to make sure your institutions are anti-fragile. That means dispersed decision-making, not centralized. It means roads and cars, and less mass transit. Companies should have disaster plans that include rapid isolation of the workforce and as much telecommuting as possible. It means people being more evenly distributed, rather than crammed into huge cities. It means having many suppliers of everything, and redundant supply chains.
This can be achieved somewhat just through tax policy. Tax incentives to companies that either move their facilities out of crowded cities or expand to other locations, Financial incentives for having a remote workforce, etc.
There are lots of ways to encourage the private market to assist in disaster prep. Ensuring that they can profit through warehousing disaster goods by allowing prices to float to market levels would be a good start. Perhaps even tax breaks for companies that do an annual certification that they can change over certain lines to manufacturing disaster goods within a fixed period of time would be good.
Or here’s a way to do it - every couple of years, the government could announce that companies that can provide ventilator model X or N95 masks or generators or whatever will be able to sell them to the government for twice the price up to a certain limit, but only if they provide them in a fixed time. This is just the cost of testing the disaster plan. Other conditions could be added to simulate disasters. For example, you could say that no raw materials from China can be used for this test, or that this other test must be run on backup power in case the grid is down, or whatever. Wargame it. The government can then take those goods and either stockpile them as a backup, donate them to the third world, replenish government hospitals, or whatever.
But the point would be to ensure that if a disaster hits, America can rapidly produce whatever is needed. If you can do that, you don’t need to store the stuff. The same philosophy holds for other disaster preparedness: As much as is possible, the answer should be to build an economy that can route around disaster like the internet does. That means less central control, just like the internet, and disaster responses by the government should be at least partly directed at making sure there are no roadblocks that prevent the private economy from solving the problem.
Yeah, I hear you…need…too…lower…caffeine…intake…