> Adding to the list of CDC failures was their utter failure to procure masks.

The CDC and prior administrations recognized the problem, but they weren't given the budget to solve it:

https://www.propublica.org/article/us-emergency-medical-stoc...:

> How Tea Party Budget Battles Left the National Emergency Medical Stockpile Unprepared for Coronavirus

> Dire shortages of vital medical equipment in the Strategic National Stockpile that are now hampering the coronavirus response trace back to the budget wars of the Obama years, when congressional Republicans elected on the Tea Party wave forced the White House to accept sweeping cuts to federal spending....

> The stockpile’s mission has steadily expanded as it confronts new public health emergencies. With limited resources, officials in charge of the stockpile tend to focus on buying lifesaving drugs from small biotechnology firms that would, in the absence of a government buyer, have no other market for their products, experts said. Masks and other protective equipment are in normal times widely available and thus may not have been prioritized for purchase, they said.

> “It just was never funded at the level that was needed to purchase new products, to replace expiring products and to invest in what we now know are the really necessary ancillary products,” said Dara Lieberman, director of government relations at the Trust for America’s Health, a nonpartisan public health advocacy and research group.

Similarly, the ventilator problem was recognized in the mid-2000s and a solution was nearly ready by 2013. However a corporate acquisition derailed the project because the new owners thought a low-cost ventilator wouldn't be profitable enough and would compete with their other product lines:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...:

> The U.S. Tried to Build a New Fleet of Ventilators. The Mission Failed.

> Thirteen years ago, a group of U.S. public health officials came up with a plan to address what they regarded as one of the medical system’s crucial vulnerabilities: a shortage of ventilators....

> Money was budgeted. A federal contract was signed. Work got underway.

> And then things suddenly veered off course. A multibillion-dollar maker of medical devices bought the small California company that had been hired to design the new machines. The project ultimately produced zero ventilators.

> That failure delayed the development of an affordable ventilator by at least half a decade, depriving hospitals, states and the federal government of the ability to stock up. The federal government started over with another company in 2014, whose ventilator was approved only last year and whose products have not yet been delivered...

> Government officials and executives at rival ventilator companies said they suspected that Covidien had acquired Newport to prevent it from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits from its existing ventilator business....

> In 2014, with no ventilators having been delivered to the government, Covidien executives told officials at the biomedical research agency that they wanted to get out of the contract, according to three former federal officials. The executives complained that it was not sufficiently profitable for the company.