Q. Power and storage consumption

Is there any way to put a female USB-A on a pendrive and get the pico to write to that? Just trying to get out of doing the SD card bit of I can.

Answer from @Gordon: plug-and-play for USB is not an option (yet)... may be it has changed.

I had similar ideas when Pico was in the making and in scope definition. Because the USB infrastructure is already there, why not use it, for example also to drive any of the available communication dongles - Bluetooth, Wifi,...