Trump Profited From His Giveaway to Big Pharma While Jacking Up Drug Costs
Por Jake Johnson — Truthout
An analysis estimates Trump increased his stock holdings from $1.7 million in 2024 to up to $56.2 million last year.
Did you know that Truthout is a nonprofit and independently funded by readers like you? If you value what we do, please support our work with a donation .
An analysis released Friday by Democrats on the congressional Joint Economic Committee details how US President Donald Trump loaded up on shares of major pharmaceutical companies last year as his administration and Republican allies enacted policies that benefited the industry — at the expense seniors and other patients.
The JEC analysis estimates that Trump increased his stock holdings in the pharmaceutical sector from $1.7 million in 2024 to as much as $56.2 million last year. The committee notes that Trump, who has repeatedly promised to cut drug prices while implementing policies that raised them, “held as much as $39.1 million in stock in the same Big Pharma companies that directly benefited” from a budget package that the president signed into law last summer.
“Trump and congressional Republicans intentionally force seniors to pay more for cancer treatment so that Big Pharma can rake in more money that Trump can personally profit from,” said Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), the JEC’s ranking member. “It’s outrageous and yet typical from this president, who makes the American people foot the bill again and again for his own gains.”
Tucked in the Trump-GOP budget law was a provision exempting some widely used, high-priced prescription drugs from Medicare price negotiations. Merck’s cancer medication Keytruda was one of the drugs temporarily shielded by the provision; Merck appears more than 60 times in the president’s 2025 financial disclosure.
The JEC analysis notes that “in 2025, Merck reported $18.8 billion in US revenues for Keytruda, which helped the company net $22.5 billion in profits that year, a 16% increase compared to 2024.”
The president also made big purchases of stock in Johnson & Johnson, AbbVie, Pfizer, and Amgen last year. The JEC found that each of those companies “had at least one drug that benefited from the carveouts” in the Trump-GOP budget law.
Additionally, the Trump administration has entered friendly agreements with pharmaceutical companies in which the president is invested, including Pfizer and Eli Lilly.
“Trump’s drug pricing deals are a mirage, designed to convince Americans that he’s taken significant action on drug pricing while creating minimal if any downside for Big Pharma,” Peter Maybarduk, access to medicines director for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said last month after his organization obtained heavily redacted texts of the agreements.
“The texts show Trump handing out favors to Big Pharma, undercutting his own models to lower prices, and throwing the support of the US government behind corporate decisions to deny medicines entirely to other countries,” said Maybarduk.
Truthout is one of only a few platforms for justice-oriented, grassroots journalism. Today, we face an existential threat.
Due to Google’s launch of AI search, we’ve seen a drastic plunge in our site traffic and, as a result, our revenue. We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.
We are fundraising right now to meet our basic operating expenses. If you can support Truthout with a one-time or monthly donation, you will make a significant impact on our work. Anything you can do makes a difference — we appreciate your support.
Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common Dreams. Follow him on Twitter: @johnsonjakep.
Get the news you want, delivered to your inbox every day.
Truthout must raise $41,000 for our basic publishing costs this month. We are appealing to our readers to make a one-time or monthly donation. Donate now if you can!
Fonte: Truthout