Department of Veterans Affairs Fails to Comply with Make PPE in America Act, US Textile Makers Say
American textile manufacturers are sounding the alarm over the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) lack of compliance with legislation mandating that it purchase American-made personal protective equipment (PPE) in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Make PPE in America Act went into effect in February 2022 as a part of President Biden’s infrastructure bill, requiring that the Departments of Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and the VA purchase PPE stock from domestic manufacturers making masks and gowns with homegrown inputs. But to date, these agencies have yet to sign contracts with any U.S. suppliers, according to National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO) president and CEO Kim Glas.
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NCTO was instrumental in pushing the legislation and developing some of its language, but more than a year after the implementation of the Make PPE in America Act, U.S. textile producers have not seen new U.S. government purchases or solicitations for business proposals—metrics that the group fastidiously tracks. “We believe that U.S. taxpayer dollars should help industry resiliency, and, in essence, our own health care security,” Glas told Sourcing Journal.
NCTO members are deeply disappointed by the VA’s lack of compliance, given that the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is the largest integrated health care system in the country, providing care for veterans at more than 1,300 facilities. “Veterans Affairs is a consistent buyer of PPE because of all the veterans hospital systems that rely on it,” she added. That stands in contrast to the Department of Health and Human Services, which procures limited PPE supply for the national stockpile, and the Department of Homeland Security, which Glas said does not purchase large volumes of PPE on a continuous basis.
Glas applauded the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations for scrutinizing the VA’s compliance efforts at a hearing on the issue that took place on Sept. 20. “I’m concerned that a year and a half after this law was enacted there appears to be very little that has changed,” Rep. Jen Kiggans, (R-Va.), the committee’s chairwoman, said last week. “I understand that new legislation takes time to implement, but issues at the VA don’t normally get better with time,” she added, pointing to a recent inspector general report that illuminated the VA’s lagging compliance with Made in America laws related to the procurement of other products.
“Relying on foreign products in a time of crisis is a flawed strategy that unfortunately was felt directly by the VA employees and veterans,” Rep. Frank Mrvan (D-In.) added. “This requires a concerted effort across VA to comply with the laws and the presidential directives in place to provide opportunities for American companies to provide personal protective equipment and other supplies.”
“Without a consistent demand for these products, we cannot ensure that American companies will be around for the next crisis,” he said.
VA representatives pointed to several issues that they said have hindered the department’s progress in sourcing American-made PPE, including the need for more internal training and resources to help accelerate compliance with the law. VA representatives also said they had encountered American PPE suppliers that did not yet have FDA approval on their products, as well as manufacturers developing PPE with inputs or raw materials from overseas—both factors that make them ineligible for contracts. They said the VA is relying on groups like the Coalition for Government Procurement, a non-profit collective of commercial contractors, for guidance, and using its Pathfinder platform, which allows potential vendors to submit themselves for consideration.
Glas said the VA has not engaged with the NCTO as a resource despite the trade group’s overtures, and she does not feel that it has made a good-faith effort to connect with compliant American suppliers. “I still don’t really have a clear answer about why,” even after the hearing, she said. “We have ample capacity. We have manufacturers who invested a lot,” including purchasing of hundreds of thousands of dollars-worth of machinery to make masks and gowns at the height of the pandemic. “It’s just beyond frustrating that [the law] is not being implemented when we are all talking about onshoring these critical supply chains.”
The inaction has left U.S. textile and apparel manufacturers in a bind, she added. Some saddled with expensive equipment have been forced to sell it at a loss. Others have had to close their operations altogether after making costly investments that didn’t pay off. “The industry got panicked calls from the VA at the height of Covid—we couldn’t provide enough PPE,” Glas said. “No one had a problem finding the industry when the country needed it, and the industry welcomed that call.”
Norman Chapman, president and CEO of South Carolina-based yarn manufacturer and weaver Inman Mills said the VA’s lack of compliance with the Make PPE in America Act “has essentially cast aside proven American-made goods in favor of cheap foreign goods from an unreliable and often unfriendly supply chain, costing our company and others millions of dollars, and disincentivizing future calls to rush in to help.”
Adolfo Solorzano Z., general manager of Florida-based textile producer American Elastic & Tape, said his “humble factory” ramped up its limited operations to manufacture more than 1 million yards of elastic each week for use in PPE during the crisis’ peak. Today, that business all but dried up. “Without consistent demand, jobs are lost, shifts are cut, profits are diminished and the path for Asian dependence is laid forth once again for another generation,” he said.
Marisa Fumei-South, founder and president of vertical knitwear manufacturer Two-One-Two New York, Inc., told Sourcing Journal that her business dove headfirst into PPE manufacturing during spring of 2020. Within months, the sweater supplier developed the capacity to make 80 million gowns and 150 million medical head covers per year after being called into action by panicked city officials, FEMA and overburdened hospitals. During the Biden administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative to ramp up vaccine and PPE production, Two-One-Two made “close to 8 million masks within 60 days.”
“At the onset, we were utilizing our technical knitting machines and we were knitting masks to shape,” she said. That effort soon evolved into making isolation gowns, requiring an investment in “several hundred pieces of equipment.” Fumei-South felt confident in the purchases because of the previous contracts the factory had secured, as well as the promise of the Make PPE in America Act, signed into law in 2021.
“We had the mindset that this [business] would be something that would continue,” she said. But today, the founder said the factory has “probably a half a million dollars of fabric sitting on a shelf.” She now feels that “All of these investments we’ve made have been for naught,” calling the VA’s lack of compliance and accountability “disheartening and troubling.”
While Fumei-South said the factory has been able to pivot and redirect its business back into other categories, the experience has left her feeling wary about working with the VA, or other government agencies, in the future. “It’s definitely affected our business and also affected the way we look at these solicitations,” she said, referring to the process by which the government garners business proposals from vendors. “We look at them with a grain of salt—is this really going to come to fruition, or is this just another waste of our time?”
Rep. Mrvan last week called the rebuilding of a viable U.S. supply chain “a Herculean task” due to “the decades of lack of emphasis on domestic manufacturing.” But remarks from those within the industry suggest that much of the heavy lifting has already been done, and the foundations laid, largely without the government’s help. The sting of uncertainty surrounding the unfulfilled contracts hasn’t only been felt by factories, but a network of American upstream partners, from mills to component makers, Fumei-South said.
“Our raw material suppliers, our fabric suppliers—we make certain that they have the same capacity to support what we could all be potentially producing,” she said. “The whole supply chain is together, collaborating in this.”
