it’s really hard to defend against an attack when someone lets the attacker inside voluntarily

This is how things will be in the future.

Warfare isn’t soldiers and nuclear weapons anymore, it’s a battle for information. Cyberattacks have been steadily increasing, and the US is not equipped to defend against them. We NEED an infrastructure overhaul to reduce our threat vectors. Otherwise, Colonial Pipeline will just be one of many.

I’m not sure what you mean when you say “chips and circuit boards” with “government-factory fail technology built in”. If you mean something like hard drives, it would be extremely easy to detect a trojan horse stored in the memory. If you mean something like the RAM, RAM cannot contain data unless it is connected to a power source. The processor is only for, well, processing information, and you would not be able to “install” a virus on it. Plausibly? Maybe you meant the motherboard. An extra chip installed might be able to run some kind of malicious code on boot, but why? Why would a hardware manufacturer risk their billion dollar company on the hope that no one leak what they had done and the no one would notice the new embedded chip?

I do agree that we need to get people back to work. Let’s work together to demand businesses start paying their workers a living wage so people are incentivized to go back to work!