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Mr. Biden’s administration followed through on those promises early in his term, helping states set up a network of drive-through testing sites working to spur development of rapid, in-home tests. He did create a testing board, White House officials said, which is composed of officials from various government agencies. The Food and Drug Administration accelerated the pace of approving at-home tests; now there are about a dozen available, up from none when he took office.

But the drive-in sites largely closed in the summer amid slumping demand as the pace of vaccinations picked up and caseloads dropped. At that time, the C.D.C. told vaccinated Americans they did not need to test if they were exposed to the coronavirus but had no symptoms. The agency reversed that guidance in September.

The United States was performing an average of 1.8 million tests per day at its peak in January, according to the Johns Hopkins data, but by July of this year, that had dropped to 424,000, even as the Delta variant began to emerge. (Today’s average stand at 1.57 million tests per day.)

The destruction of Abbott’s tests in August came precisely as the administration should have been preparing for a fall and winter surge, said Dr. Nuzzo of Johns Hopkins.

“There was no forward-looking, ‘Well, what if cases go up again? How will be build back the infrastructure that we let erode?’” she said, adding, “It was a pretty reasonable expectation that cases could go up again.”

After Omicron hit at the end of November, the president announced that those with private insurance could be reimbursed for the purchase of at-home tests, and pledged to deliver 50 million rapid tests to community health centers.

The testing announcement on Tuesday, which expanded on that commitment, reflected how the Omicron surge caught the White House off guard — as Mr. Biden himself acknowledged when reporters questioned him at the White House.