Nineteen Republican Senators, in an effort to burnish their bipartisanship creds, have been snookered into signing onto a quarter of President Biden’s spending extravaganza — with zip in return. Oh, sorry, they did block spending $40 billion on additional IRS agents, or at least pushed it into a subsequent bill.

What they should have demanded was a delay in the $5 trillion sequel, the American Family spendfest, until after America has a chance to vote on it in November 2022. Never in the history of the republic has the Congress without a clear mandate been asked to spend $5 trillion as an election is approaching.

Without getting into the pluses and minuses of the infrastructure bill, mostly greenish minuses, it is a breathtaking waste of an opportunity. If you’re going to spend $1.2 trillion, it would be nice to get something of real value for it. Some have suggested a fitting, if modest, exchange would have been reversing Biden’s veto of the Keystone XL pipeline. Thematically elegant, it would at least fit the definition of infrastructure, although it hardly qualifies as “real value.”

Remember, Mr. Biden’s veto doesn’t stop the oil; it simply shifts its mode of transportation to rail (a boon for Warren Buffett) and truck, at greater cost and damage to the environment. America is not running short of oil. So building the pipeline has little strategic value — although it would be satisfying to make President Biden have to eat his veto and return this pipeline to America’s figure. It’s the least one could do for bipartisanship.

Another infrastructure project of enormous and immediate utility is that shovel-ready, half complete, infrastructure-in-waiting, border wall. Not only would the wall’s completion help with the assertion of our national sovereignty, but it would end the current medical experiment in COVID variant diversity taking place in our immigrant holding pens. With a little of that money, we could shut down Wuhan on the Rio Grande.

There is, though, one real hole in our infrastructure that, if left un-repaired, has the potential to do a lot more damage than a pothole. This would be our vast pharmaceutical supply chain. You might recall that, at the height of the pandemic, Communist China threatened to cut off our supply of key active pharmaceutical ingredients, the chemical building blocks of many of our drugs. The PRC also threatened our supply of certain generic drugs, like antibiotics.

That’s a sector where profit margins are so low that they are entirely outsourced to the lowest bidder. It’s how you get carcinogens in Zantac. This pricing pressure, which probably seemed like a good idea at the time, has made the Communist China one of the biggest beneficiaries of Medicare Part D. There is some national awareness of this vulnerability, but little organized activity at the federal level to address it.

If the Defense Department weren’t so busy with social engineering, it would focus on real threats — such as leaving key components of an industry that literally saves the lives of millions of Americans in the hands of our worst enemy. Incomprehensible. The problem now, though, is ready made for an approach centered on infrastructure. Certainly the repatriation of our pharmaceutical supply chain would require bricks, mortar, and cutting-edge, shiny equipment.

Isn’t that the essence of high-value infrastructure? It is beyond the scope of this article to lay out in detail all that would be involved in accomplishing this. We have seen, however, how working closely with the private sector, Operation Warp Speed was able to produce three vaccines in record time. With a similar sense of urgency, and with the extravagance implicit in a $1.2 trillion spending program, we should be able to wean ourselves from China in fairly short order.

If nothing else, the pharmaceutical story has taught us that it is a really bad idea to leave a high value hostage behind enemy lines. It’s not the only opportunity out there, though. Another would be to use infrastructure spending to combat climate change, a liberal twofer. The idea would be to redirect some of the spending to build desalinization plants on the West Coast to offset the drought effect of climate change — make sure the vegetable basket of America is adequately irrigated regardless of rainfall.

The quibbling class might object that something like the pharmaceutical supply chain, involving public/private partnership, might enrich private companies. This is a specious concern. Pfizer and Moderna did pretty well working on Warp Speed, and we are all better off for it. If the Fed had just bought a few shares of their stock it might have paid for the whole program. Matters of national security have always trumped free market puritanism.

If Big Pharma were to benefit from a national effort to repatriate its supply chain this would be no different from allowing Lockheed Martin to make a profit on the F35. As it is, Mr. Biden and his Republican enablers have produced a bill that spends a ton of money addressing infrastructure needs that rank near the bottom of any national priority list. GOP senators, from whom we expect more, have sleepwalked through this infrastructure show, without getting anything in return.

And without producing anything of real value…except favorable mention in the liberal press. If you are going to sell out in the name of bipartisanship, for goodness sake, demand a decent price.

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Mr. Childs is a Florida-based private investor whose holdings include some pharmaceutical stocks.