about this subject.
The US government is very limited in what it can buy from non US manufacturers. Lots and lots of restrictions.
They claimed, at the time, there were a couple scenarios that the US would find itself with huge shortages due to restrictions on who they could buy from. A pandemic was one of the scenarios.
The globalization of manufacturing, specifically from China, was causing many US companies to abandon manufacturing in the US completely. And the government was not able to stockpile supplies for disaster scenarios because they were not allowed to buy from many of these companies when they removed manufacturing from the US.
We have some natural disaster scenarios where we will be short stockpiled supplies that are even worse than this one. But no President is going to be able to fix this unless laws are removed.