Earlier this month, Bloomberg published a brutal autopsy of industrial policy gone wrong. The article documented how, beginning in 2020, the U.S. government provided $850 million to six American companies to bolster domestic manufacturing of nitrile gloves, a critical component of the medical supply chain.

Six years later, not one of those companies is making gloves.

The company that received the most funding, Blue Star NBR out of Wytheville, Virginia, was supposed to use that money to build the first American plant in a generation capable of making nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR)—the raw material every nitrile glove is made of. It never produced a single batch. Its CEO said he is a month from selling the plant for parts, most of which will go to manufacturers based in China. To put it bluntly: American taxpayers built a synthetic rubber plant, and China may now cart it off in crates.

The lesson that many are drawing is that this episode “shows the difficulty of reviving US manufacturing,” as the Bloomberg piece has it.  Not exactly. What the glove program demonstrates is that one cannot successfully protect American industry purely by subsidizing supply; the home market must also be secured. The only trade measure Washington ever deployed for these factories was a tariff aimed at a single country—and a tariff on one country, for a product a dozen countries will happily ship at two cents a glove, is not enough.

And in fact, the Biden administration officials who pushed the policy seem to have recognized that. In September 2024, when the USTR raised the duty on Chinese medical gloves from 7.5 percent to 50 percent for 2025 and 100 percent for 2026, it wrote that the tariff increases would “help protect those investments” the government had made in glove manufacturers.

So far, so good. But in the very next clause, it was observed that the tariff “will encourage diversification to sources other than China,” with “third-country sources” providing the alternative supply. The government hedged, in other words. And stakeholders noticed. The American Medical Manufacturers Association, even while asking for 100 percent immediately, warned that “tariffs on Chinese goods, without other strategic actions, are likely to result in supply shifting to other low-cost countries.” Blue Star’s own president, Scott Maier, wrote in early 2025 that a China-only glove tariff “will simply shift U.S. dependence back to where it was four years ago, Malaysia and Thailand.”

The importers followed the instructions. Census data for the main Chinese medical glove line shows the direct China trade collapsing in the first year of the 100 percent rate.

If a China tariff were sufficient, that collapse should have shown up as orders from American suppliers. Instead, those orders went to Kuala Lumpur. Since the tariffs were put in place, total U.S. medical glove imports actually increased by 19 percent.

Considered by country, the make-up of imports changed even more dramatically. China shipped 107 million dozen pairs a month in 2024, 40 percent of the U.S. market. Within a single month of the 50 percent rate taking effect, that share had dropped to 3 percent. Meanwhile, Malaysia’s share jumped from 44 percent to 68 percent. And Vietnam nearly tripled its shipments within weeks at declared values of roughly a cent and a half a glove: the same as the pre-tariff Chinese price.

Meanwhile, the share of this market claimed by American manufacturers stayed pitifully consistent: roughly 1 percent of the more than 100 billion gloves the country uses every year. The tariff moved tens of billions of gloves from one foreign supplier to another–but failed to bring a single production line home. The factories the tariff was supposed to revive failed as though nothing had changed. SafeSource Direct suspended operations and laid off some 700 workers in September 2025, nine months into the 50 percent rate.

To add insult to injury, the replacement supplies have not even reduced our dependence on Beijing. The Malaysian gloves that now dominate our market are mostly made using raw materials from China, as Bloomberg notes. And in some cases, Chinese companies are simply moving some operations into third countries: the Chinese-owned Intco Medical, the world’s largest glove maker, is building an Indonesian complex designed for up to 40 billion gloves a year (“largely targeted at US demand,” per one analyst) and just brought a new Vietnamese plant online at the end of last year.

My organization, the Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA), identified these issues in our comments on the Trump administration’s Section 232 investigation into medical imports. We showed how Chinese and Vietnamese gloves were entering at near-identical prices, and warned that China’s falling direct share was misleading, since it was simply shifting production to operations in third countries. The months since have proven the point. Together, Vietnam and Indonesia represented 23 percent of U.S. medical glove imports in May 2026, against 4 percent in 2024: their gains tracking China's losses almost perfectly in reverse. 

This is the “China outpost” problem, and we should assume this will be the default strategy of big Chinese industrial concerns. A China-only tariff doesn’t remove Chinese supply from your market. It launders it.

The reason is that protective tariffs exist to close that gap against every foreign supplier—to reserve the home market for the producers you are asking investors to finance. A tariff that exempts other producers who can operate at vastly lower costs than are possible in the home country will inevitably fail. Washington spent nearly a billion dollars erecting plants whose output was guaranteed to be undersold from the day the ribbon was cut, waited until most of them had already failed to impose any tariff at all, and then aimed the tariff at one country out of the dozen willing to sell at two cents. The administration’s current fallback, Buy American procurement, covers the roughly 2 billion gloves a year the federal government buys: about 2 percent of national consumption. No one finances a factory for 2 percent of a market.

Happily, the solution is simple. The Department of Commerce opened a Section 232 national security investigation into medical supplies last September, and gloves are expressly in scope. The statutory report was due to the President at the end of May, with his decision window running through late summer. The pharmaceutical 232 investigation has already produced tariffs taking effect this month. When the medical supplies investigation concludes, Washington should take a specific duty—we suggest a five cents a glove, ten cents a pair—and apply it to every single country of origin.

Every country, because that is the only geometry that constitutes protection. A universal tariff leaves no outpost to flee to: the Chinese-owned line in Indonesia pays the same nickel as the line in Guangdong. The nickel makes domestic production viable on contact—a glove landing at two to two-and-a-half cents pays its nickel and sells at seven-plus, above the six cents American Armor Gloves told Commerce it needs to compete, and comfortably above the viability floor other domestic producers have documented.

And a specific duty, because ad valorem rates invite foreign exporters to set their own tariffs. We ran this experiment with the Biden policy, which had the effect of depressing declared prices on the surviving China trade and on the companion surgical glove line. But quantities jumped six- and seven-fold while declared unit values collapsed by as much as 85 percent, keeping declared value almost perfectly flat. In other words, costs didn’t fall. Invoices did. At a 100 percent rate, every penny shaved off a declared value saves a penny of duty, and a glove declared at two cents leaves endless room for shaving.

None of this would have surprised Henry Clay. Arguing in 1842 against relying on foreign invoice valuations for ad valorem duties, Henry Clay observed that the system permitted “frauds in which the foreigner, with his double and triple and quadruple invoices, ready to be produced as circumstances may require, fixes the value of the merchandise taxed.”  This is as true today as it was 184 years ago. And the cure is the same: write the schedule in cents per unit, not percentages.

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“A clear per-unit tariff is simple to enforce, prevents under-valuation, and signals that the United States intends to rebuild this strategic industry,” as we pointed out in our October comments.

And the users? Here is the part hospital lobbyists will not tell you. A box of 100 nitrile exam gloves imported at $2–3 retails for $8–15—the markup between the dock and the exam room is several times the import price, and it dwarfs the duty. Even at full pass-through, a nickel a glove puts hospital prices around eight cents—still well below the 14 cents hospitals were paying per glove in 2021, when the industry’s answer to scarcity was price, not supply. Gloves are a rounding error in the cost of a medical encounter. A nickel at the wharf disappears into the distribution chain’s margins; it does not show up in anyone’s hospital bill.

The way to redeem the glove program’s billion dollars is not another appropriation, another waiver, or another procurement memo—and it is certainly not another tariff on China alone, which we should now assume merely will merely redirect Chinese supply through third countries. It is a nickel, collected at the wharf, on every glove from everywhere. Protection is the policy that costs the taxpayer nothing and pays for itself twice over: in the immediate revenues for the Treasury, and in the bailouts of American factories that never have to happen.