"The U.S. govt poorly handled a natural disaster 15 years ago, therefore of course the govt would handle a global pandemic poorly" just lacks all logic. It ignores that natural disasters are different than pandemics, changes made to government agencies, etc.
You have a system which handles large problems poorly. This has been demonstrated time and again, even if it's denied by a large chunk of the population, with Republicans denying all military failures, and Democrats denying all welfare failures, and so on.
You spend more than anyone else on your military, yet can't defeat a bunch of goatherds, and allow another great power to stomp over your allies freely. You spend more than anyone else on education, yet large chunks of your population lack functional literacy. You spend more than anyone else on healthcare, yet get worse outcomes of infant and maternal mortality, and have descending longevity. You spend more than anyone else on transport, yet have crumbling infrastructure. And so on.
To a degree, this is nothing inherent in the American character, though the insistence on "freedom!" means endless duplication of effort, and like the wonderful scene in The Wire where four guys struggle moving a desk through the door because nobody bothered to ask if they wanted to move it out or in, you have many groups trying to help but actually hindering each-other. That part is your character, but it's a minor issue. The main issue is simply that sufficiently complex systems will inevitably fail.
As a country or organisation encounters problems, it adds systems and staff and layers of bureaucracy and rules to deal with them. These initially help, but of course have gaps. So more systems and staff and layers of bureaucracy and rules are come up with - and each addition helps by a smaller amount, until those diminishing returns become negative returns, which is to say that things get
worse. As things get worse, the response is of course to... do it all again, and make things worse still.
And this is what leads to the collapse of complex societies. One of the unfortunate aspects of collapse is that each step down is followed by a slight recovery, so that everyone thinks things are picking up and there's no need to change anything fundamental - which then continues undermining things and leads to the next drop down.
It's hard to see it. A fish can't see the water. There are things which you'll be able to see clearly about my country I won't be aware of, too.