President Donald Trump is threatening his steepest pharmaceutical tariffs yet as the administration continues to push countries into trade deals.
“On pharmaceuticals, we’ll be putting an initially small tariff on pharmaceuticals, but in one year, one and a half years maximum, it’s going to go to 150%, and then it’s going to go to 250%, because we want pharmaceuticals made in our country,” Trump said on CNBC Tuesday.
The president also said that official announcements about tariffs on semiconductors and pharmaceutical imports would be announced in the “next week or so” — and that the pharmaceutical tariffs would be separate from the 15% baseline tariffs.
A significant portion of the drugs in the United States come from overseas, including many EU countries and India. Pharmaceutical tariffs have been a sticking point in the administration’s negotiations with countries like Switzerland, whose largest export is pharmaceuticals.
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The president has sent the pharmaceutical industry scrambling throughout the start of his second term — just last week, the president sent letters to more than a dozen drug companies, including AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, giving them steps to take to lower the cost of prescription drugs.
The White House said that the companies must provide most-favored nation pricing to all Medicaid patients — and pharmaceutical stocks fell in response.
In a May executive order, Trump pledged to drop prescription drug prices by as much as 90%.
“The president is dead serious about lowering drug prices,” a White House official said at the time.
That order directed the secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate with the pharmaceutical industry. If progress isn’t made, the administration said it will impose “most favored nation” pricing through rulemaking.
In early July, the president again spooked the industry with the threat of a 200% tariff, but Tuesday’s announcement of 250% is the highest threat Trump has made against the industry to date.
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