A national security emergency is quickly approaching due to the U.S.’s dependency on China’s supply of medical-grade nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR), with Blue Star NBR CEO Scott Maier making an urgent plea to the Trump administration before time runs out.
Gloves made from the synthetic rubber material are used throughout several key services and supply chains — including in the pharmaceutical, manufacturing, food processing, and defense industries. The gloves also serve a particularly critical purpose in rare earth refineries and semiconductor factories.
Maier joined Breitbart News Saturday host Matthew Boyle to discuss why Americans, especially President Donald Trump, should be alarmed at the prospect of becoming reliant on China for necessary personal protective equipment (PPE) items in a matter of days.
“The industry is on life support,” Maier said. “Our contract runs out at the end of this coming week, and unless something happens, we’re going to have to sell off this equipment.”
China made rapid increases in the market share of U.S. medical glove imports during former President Joe Biden’s tenure, according to data from the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC).
In 2019, during Trump’s first term in office, the data showed that the U.S. relied on China for about 14.2 percent of such medical gloves. Other Asian countries that are friendlier to the U.S., but still reliant on China for the raw materials, made up 85.7 percent of imports. Domestic manufacturing accounted for zero percent.
“Other major glove producers in Asia like Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam — they all have to buy their NBR from China. So China kind of de facto controls 90 percent of our glove supply,” Maier told Boyle.
In Biden’s first year as commander-in-chief, China increased its share of imports of medical gloves to the U.S. to 26.8 percent, while the other countries dropped to 73.1 percent. By 2023, China had increased its share to 44.15 percent — while the other countries dropped to just 53.6 percent.
There was one shining light — thanks to a program that was started during the first Trump administration, 2023 also saw an increase in the virtually nonexistent domestic medical glove production up to 2.22 percent.
The federal government spent $123 million on Blue Star NBR’s project to build a manufacturing plant and employ about 2,500 Americans in Wytheville, Virginia, but continued support was hindered due to “lack of action and engagement by the Biden administration,” Kristina Wong wrote for Breitbart News in 2023.
“Blue Star anticipated securing a federal loan package from the U.S. International Development Finance Corp. (DFC), an agency that President Donald Trump authorized in 2020 to use funds for two years to support domestic companies producing resources needed during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Virginia Business explained.
While the plant is about 80 percent of the way completed, it is not operational due to the pullback of funding. If finished, it would be the only plant in the U.S. capable of producing NBR gloves without needing the materials from China.
In March of this year, Maier said his company, which has a 100 percent Continental United States (CONUS) supply chain, received word from the Trump administration that aiding in the company’s reindustrialization is “no longer a priority.”
The Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), the government’s supply of pharmaceuticals and medical products, has only a 15-day supply of gloves that are already expired, the CEO explained.
“These D.C. bureaucrats don’t want to restock the SNS,” he remarked to Boyle in the Saturday interview. “It’s just unconscionable -– these decisions that are happening.”
Bloomberg published an exposé on the issue earlier this month, criticizing the government for being complicit in the fact that the U.S. cannot produce these gloves.
The Washington Post also drew attention to the problem in 2023, reporting that the D.C. bureaucracy “mothballed” the company rather than giving them the remaining funding that they needed.
According to Maier, private funding has been hard to come across because “no private investor is going to put in money to gain less than one percent market share of something.”
It would only take an additional $60 million to get Blue Star NBR’s facility “complete and operational,” he continued, noting that his plant would be able to support almost ten percent of America’s glove needs.
“The people that are stopping this are quite clearly either compromised by China — or very, very, very dumb,” Boyle remarked.
If nothing changes by the end of this week, Maier said Blue Star NBR will have to sell all of its equipment.
“Every bone in my body doesn’t want to sell this equipment, because it is the only infrastructure in the United States that can make this chemical to make these gloves,” Maier said. “And you would think the government would realize that and not want these critical resources to get sold off, but like you said, there are just some dumb D.C. bureaucrats that don’t seem to have a handle on this.”
When asked what would happen if China decided one day to stop allowing these gloves to come to the U.S., Maier estimated that it would be a matter of weeks before the healthcare and industrial industries are in crisis mode.
Stating that he hopes the president and the people around him are paying attention to this issue, Boyle asked Maier what the administration could do if they hear his concerns before time runs out.
“I think POTUS could make a call to [Health and Human Services] HHS and say, ‘Hey, give this company another one-year extension, and in the meantime, guess what I’m going to do? I’m going to put a significant tariff on imported gloves.’”
“He can also extend the executive order to the Department of War saying, ‘Hey, any DOW contractor that’s supplying you know anything to DOW, you must use American-made nitrile gloves because we don’t want China shutting off our manufacturing,” Maier continued.
Addressing Trump directly, Boyle concluded his segment with, “Mr. President, if you’re listening — this is it. This is the fight.”
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.