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Patient Advocates Warn Trump Pharma Tariffs Could 'Drive Up Costs and Create More Uncertainty'
One campaigner urged the administration to "focus on real solutions to support more transparent and diverse supply sources and make targeted investments for the supply of key medicines."
Apr 02, 2026
On Thursday, the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump's so-called Liberation Day, US advocacy groups sounded the alarm about his new tariffs targeting "patented pharmaceuticals and their ingredients under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 to bolster American national security and public health."
The administration announced a year ago that the US Department of Commerce would conduct a related investigation under that law. The resulting report was recently sent to the president, and although the findings have not been made public, Trump's executive order summarizes key takeaways and Secretary Howard Lutnick's recommended actions.
According to the order, the secretary's recommendations included "continuing to negotiate onshoring agreements related to most favored nation (MFN) pharmaceutical pricing agreements; imposing significant tariffs on pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical ingredients, so that such imports will not threaten to impair the national security of the United States; and granting preferential treatment to those companies that commit to onshore production of pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical ingredients."
Citing an unnamed Trump administration official, The Washington Post reported Thursday that "the White House has reached agreements with 13 drugmakers and expects to soon conclude an additional four." As part of these deals, companies are planning to invest at least $400 billion in new US plants.
The Post also pointed out that "some imported drugs will face much lower tariffs under trade deals Trump negotiated with five US trading partners. Goods from the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and Switzerland will face 15% levies, while drugs from the United Kingdom, which was the first to sign a deal with Trump, will be hit with a 10% tariff."
Thanks to Trump's new order, brand-name pharmaceuticals made in other countries could be hit with tariffs as high as 100%.
Merith Basey, CEO of Patients for Affordable Drugs, warned in a statement that "while these tariffs aim to pressure pharmaceutical corporations into US manufacturing and most favored nation agreements, the current MFN deals remain opaque and voluntary, and have not delivered meaningful savings for the vast majority of American patients. There's a real risk these tariffs will drive up costs and create more uncertainty for millions of patients already struggling to afford their medications."
Experts at Public Citizen, another advocacy group that has sued to expose the secretive MFN agreements, were similarly critical.
"By announcing these tariffs without even producing the evidence from the investigation that supposedly justifies them, Trump is continuing his pattern of grabbing headlines by using the word 'tariff' while engaging in secretive ongoing negotiations and opaque exemptions processes that are ripe for corporate corruption," said Public Citizen Global Trade Watch director Melinda St. Louis—who also wrote a broader takedown of Trump's trade policy published Thursday by Common Dreams.
"While strategic tariffs can be used to support domestic manufacturing and good jobs, they must be paired with real public investments and support for workers' rights, which Trump has systematically undermined," she said. "Instead, he's bullying other countries like the UK into paying more for medicines, which will lead to windfall profits for Big Pharma and do nothing to reduce US prices."
Peter Maybarduk, director of Access to Medicines at Public Citizen, stressed that "Trump's tariffs will be either ineffective or harmful for what people need, which is a reliable, plentiful, affordable supply of medicine."
Also taking aim at the "secretive arrangements that allow Trump to claim specious victories on manufacturing and high drug prices," Maybarduk explained that "in reality, many manufacturing commitments claimed under the deals were part of previously planned projects and the drug pricing commitments appear designed to largely spare drug company profits rather than earnestly address affordability concerns."
"Meanwhile the administration has given drugmakers perks like lucrative vouchers to accelerate FDA review of their medicines and a promise from the Trump administration that it will bully other countries into adopting higher prescription drug prices, using tariffs as leverage," he continued, referring to the Food and Drug administration.
"If the administration wants to fix problems like medicines shortages and fragile supply chains," he argued, "it should focus on real solutions to support more transparent and diverse supply sources and make targeted investments for the supply of key medicines."
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‘A System Rigged’: Untaxed Wealth of Richest 0.1% Is More Than Assets of World’s Poorest Half
A decade after the Panama Papers, the global rich are still hiding more than $2.8 trillion in tax havens. Just a fraction of that money could end extreme hunger and provide clean water to everyone on Earth.
Apr 02, 2026
The richest 0.1% of people on Earth are hiding more than $2.8 trillion in offshore accounts to avoid taxes. That money alone is more wealth than is owned by the entire bottom half of humanity, more than 4.1 billion people.
These findings were published in a report released Thursday by Oxfam International on the 10th anniversary of the 2016 Panama Papers, which provided an unprecedented look at how the world's most powerful capitalists, financiers, political leaders, celebrities, and criminals exploited offshore tax havens to stash their money.
"Ten years on, the superrich are still sequestering oceans of wealth in offshore vaults,” said Christian Hallum, Oxfam International’s tax lead.
The percentage of untaxed wealth in offshore accounts has dropped in the past 10 years, in large part due to global reforms like the adoption of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Automatic Exchange of Information framework (AEOI), which allows revenue authorities around the world to easily share information and crack down on cheats.
However, many nations in the Global South are excluded from this system, even though they need the tax revenue the most.
Oxfam found that a staggering $3.5 trillion, more than 3.2% of the global gross domestic product, still remains in untaxed accounts. That's more than the entire GDP of France and is more than twice the combined wealth of the world's 44 poorest nations.
And while the percentage of untaxed wealth is shrinking, that doesn't mean inequality has shrunk.
On the contrary, the December 2025 "World Inequality Report" found that the richest 0.001% of humanity—fewer than 60,000 multimillionaires and billionaires—now have three times as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population combined.
Inequality has surged around the world in part due to taxation policies and pandemic recovery packages that overwhelmingly favor the rich. The most glaring was adopted in the world's financial hub, the United States, last year.
The megabudget passed by Republicans and signed into law by President Donald Trump handed a $1 trillion tax cut to America's wealthiest 1% while slashing more than $1 trillion in spending from Medicaid, food assistance, and other safety net programs. It has been described by some economists as the largest upward transfer of wealth in US history.
While the global top 0.1% holds about 80% of untaxed offshore wealth, an even smaller group of uber-wealthy individuals does most of the cheating. The world's richest 0.01%, who hold at least $50 million apiece, control about half of all money in global tax shelters—$1.7 trillion.
According to the Tax Justice Network's Corporate Tax Haven Index, Caribbean islands under UK ownership, including the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, and Bermuda, are among the worst offenders. Other notable tax havens include Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, and the Netherlands.
A February Oxfam report on Elon Musk, who is well on his way to becoming the world's first trillionaire, found that his company, Tesla—which managed to pay zero dollars on its $2.3 billion income in 2024—has not published a country-by-country report on its taxes and that it has subsidiaries in many countries considered to be tax havens.
Big Pharma companies, including AbbVie and Merck, also used tax shelters to lower their total tax expense in 2025 by more than $1 billion, according to a report released earlier this month by the Financial Accountability & Corporate Transparency Coalition.
"This isn’t just about clever accounting—it’s about power and impunity," Hallum said. "When millionaires and billionaires stash trillions of dollars in offshore tax havens, they place themselves above the obligations that bind the rest of society."
"The consequences are as predictable as they are devastating," he continued. "We see our public hospitals and schools starved of funds, our social fabric shredded by rising inequality, and ordinary people forced to shoulder the costs of a system rigged to enrich a tiny few.”
Even a fraction of the money currently stashed away by the world's wealthiest could alleviate untold amounts of suffering.
In November, the United Nations' World Food Program estimated that extreme hunger, which currently affects more than 318 million people around the world, could be eradicated by 2030 with investments of about $93 billion per year, but that global hunger programs instead remain “slow, fragmented, and underfunded."
According to a 2021 UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report, investments of around $114 billion per year would similarly be enough to ensure that everyone on Earth has access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
Oxfam called on governments around the world to increase coordination to prevent the wealthy from hiding their riches from tax authorities. It also urged them to adopt more aggressive policies to tax the 1%'s wealth at home, including taxes on income and on extreme wealth.
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In Leaked Video, Maine Voters Challenge Mills on Vetoes, Gun Control, and More
One voter told the Maine governor, who is running for US Senate, that she is wondering "why you would fight on behalf of us on the national level if you couldn't do it on the state level."
Mar 24, 2026
Most of the national news surrounding the Maine Democratic Senate primary has zeroed in on candidate Graham Platner's record—a tattoo he got while serving in the Marines and posts he wrote several years ago on Reddit.
But a video recording obtained by Drop Site News of a local Democratic group's Zoom meeting last week with Platner's main opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, brought to light discussions Maine voters are having not about the first-time candidate's controversies—which have done little to damage his campaign, according to numerous polls—but about the record of the governor who's run the state for the last six years.
For 30 minutes on March 19, members of the Hancock County Democrats grilled Mills about her history of vetoing significant pieces of legislation and opposing measures broadly supported by Mainers.
⚡️Leaked Video: Janet Mills Attack Ad Against Graham Platner Backfires With Maine Democrats
A Zoom recording with Gov. Janet Mills captures unfiltered voter reactions to the governor’s recent attack ad against her U.S. Senate primary opponent, Graham Platner.
Story by… pic.twitter.com/xF6bmqDsAf
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) March 23, 2026
A former Democratic state representative, Mark Worth, asked Mills early in the question-and-answer session about her "record on tribal sovereignty, labor, and gun safety bills, such as your veto of the red flag law"—an apparent reference to Mills' opposition to the red flag law that was passed by referendum in 2025, with 62% supporting the measure to make it easier for law enforcement to take away someone's firearm if they pose a threat to themself or others.
Mills instead supported the state's "yellow flag law," which requires police to take a person into custody and obtain an assessment by a mental health professional before a gun can be taken away.
Nearly two dozen states and the District of Columbia have red flag laws, also known as extreme risk protection orders, and they are supported by 77% of Americans, including a majority of gun owners and Republicans, according to an APM Research Lab/Guns & America/Call To Mind poll from 2019.
Mills responded to the question by defending gun control legislation that has passed in Maine during her tenure—including a ban on ghost guns and expanded background checks—but did not mention the broadly popular red flag law that she opposed.
She said that she had sought to find "common ground" between gun control advocates and gun owners—even though the referendum was supported by nearly two-thirds of voters, including many gun owners—one of whom was Platner, a combat veteran.
The governor has also been criticized for vetoing a bill that would have barred the state from seizing tribal lands, and has angered the state's labor movement several times, including when she vetoed an offshore wind development bill due to her opposition to an amendment requiring collective bargaining agreements, and another measure that would have allowed farmworkers to unionize.
At the meeting this month, a voter named Diana Morenda introduced herself as a "three-time cancer veteran" and asked about two other vetoes by the governor—those of LD 765, which aimed to prohibit "unsupported price increases" of prescription drugs, and LD 1117, which would have prohibited excessive rises in the price of generic prescription drugs.
With the vetoes, Morenda told Mills, she "essentially destroyed any chance that your constituents would have had to combat excessive pricing, kind of siding with Big Pharma."
"You can understand why I... and many others in Hancock County, we might be wondering out loud why you would fight on behalf of us on the national level if you couldn't do it on the state level," said Morenda.
Mills responded similarly as she had to the earlier question, naming other moves she's taken to increase access to prescription drugs and price transparency and telling the voter, "Whoever gave you those two numbers didn't give you the rest of the bills that we did pass."
The controversies surrounding Platner's campaign came up during the meeting, with Worth telling Mills her recent attack ad against Platner was "divisive and odious," and another voter accusing the governor of "using underhanded means" against her opponent.
The ad included several women looking at posts Platner wrote in 2013 disparaging sexual assault survivors. Platner has addressed his old online comments several times, saying his views have evolved since he wrote them.
One voter disclosed that he is a friend of Platner's before asking Mills: "Do you believe in a Maine and a country where a person can be redeemed? Where they can change and become a better version of themself?"
Mills deflected the question, claiming that her concern is not "whether he's reformed or thinks better," but electability.
"The issue is who can beat Susan Collins," said Mills, referring to the state's Republican senator.
The governor has persistently claimed that she has the greatest chance of beating Collins in November, contrary to several polls.
The voter addressed those claims in his question.
"You say electability is what you're looking for here," he said. "And if you truly do believe that and you've read the polls—which I imagine you have—that isn't the case."
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