President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at lowering prescription drug costs has become a Rorschach test for Democrats: It’s either an opportunity to work with Republicans or a promise without substance.
“Any way we can lower prescription drug costs is a plus, and I think Congress should do more,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal told NOTUS. “Anything that achieves the right result, I will support.”
His Connecticut colleague in the Senate had a different reaction.
“Republicans have been fighting us tooth and nail on prescription drug pricing for decades,” Sen. Chris Murphy told NOTUS. “The only reason why prescription drug prices aren’t lower is because Trump’s Republican Party has stopped us from passing legislation to keep them lower. So that’s the reality of both past, present and future.”
“It’s not real,” Murphy added. “It’s like most things that get posted from the White House, it’s not real.”
Trump’s executive order doesn’t specifically mention which prescription drugs would be affected, but it speaks generally to the need to ensure that Americans aren’t “forced to subsidize low-cost prescription drugs and biologics in other developed countries, and face overcharges for the same products in the United States.”
“This abuse of Americans’ generosity, who deserve low-cost pharmaceuticals on the same terms as other developed nations, must end,” the executive order states. “Americans will no longer be forced to pay almost three times more for the exact same medicines, often made in the exact same factories. As the largest purchaser of pharmaceuticals, Americans should get the best deal.”
The president on Monday said the executive order would cut some prescription drug prices by as much as 90%.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin told NOTUS that she “welcomes any serious actions to lower prescription drug prices” and suggested that Trump and Republicans “fully embrace Medicare negotiation and hasten it and increase the number of drugs that are being negotiated.”
“What we saw from President Trump is not serious policy,” Baldwin said. “This ‘most-favored-nation’ status, there’s no meat to that.”
Sen. Mark Kelly said he would “take a look” at Trump’s proposal, but added that “prescription drugs are too expensive in our country for seniors.” He said Congress should continue negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies much like it did when it passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. The IRA, in part, capped the cost of insulin at $35 for at least 3 million Americans.
“We should keep that in effect because it’s bringing down prices,” Kelly told NOTUS.
The announcement set off a scramble of congressional efforts to complement Trump’s executive order. Sens. Josh Hawley and Peter Welch teamed up on a bipartisan bill that, if passed, would prohibit pharmaceutical companies from selling prescription drugs at costs higher than the international average and would charge companies that violate this rule.
“We want to make sure that [the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] gets the benefit of this so everybody who’s on Medicare and also everybody who has private insurance can have their key prices kept as well,” Hawley told NOTUS.
In the House, Rep. Ro Khanna said he plans to introduce bipartisan legislation “exactly as written” as Trump’s executive order. Khanna wrote on X Sunday night asking for Republican support to ensure that Speaker Mike Johnson would bring his possible legislation up for a vote on the floor. (Khanna’s office couldn’t be reached immediately for this story).
On the Republican side, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who in the past called for Congress to embrace bipartisanship on drug price legislation, called Trump’s plan “fairly controversial.”
“He clearly wants to lower drug prices,” Thune told reporters. “It’s something, like a lot of other issues that he’s had a passion about and believed in for a long time.”
That hesitance would make for an uphill battle for Hawley and Welch’s bill to pass the Senate.
Hawley told NOTUS that although Senate Republican leadership knows his position, they haven’t given him any assurances about supporting his bill. However, Hawley is confident that Trump’s support could be enough to get the bill to pass.
“After today, it’s clear what the president’s position is,” Hawley said. “This would be one of the best things we could do for people out there who cannot afford their prescription drugs.”
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Tinashe Chingarande is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Ursula Perano contributed reporting.