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The White House says President Donald Trump’s administration has negotiated pharmaceutical deals aimed at reducing U.S. prescription drug prices, projecting $529 billion in savings over the next 10 years. The White House’s economists estimate that the approach—described as cutting some U.S. prices toward what other countries pay—would lower costs for Americans while also changing how drugmakers earn revenue from where their products are sold.
The estimates were produced for the White House Council of Economic Advisers, according to an analysis obtained by The Associated Press. The same analysis also attempts to forecast prospective savings as additional medications enter the framework, and it includes an alternative model that estimates $733 billion in savings over a decade.
Beyond the overall savings figure, the White House projection also includes government cost reductions. The administration estimates that federal and state governments could save a combined $64.3 billion on Medicaid over the next decade as a result of the “most favored nation” policy for drug pricing.
Trump has framed the drug-pricing effort as a major election-year affordability push. Speaking at a rally Friday in Florida to a crowd of seniors, he said, “Now you have the lowest drug prices anywhere in the world,” and added, “And that alone should win us the midterms.”
The White House projections arrive as cost-of-living concerns remain central to voters and as higher energy prices tied to the Iran war have increased public anxiety, AP reported. Administration officials have argued that the deals are transformative and have urged Congress to codify the policy principles into law.
Democratic lawmakers, however, have raised doubts about both the size of the claimed savings and the ability to verify how the administration produced its numbers. AP reported that few details of the agreements with 17 leading pharmaceutical companies have been made public, making it difficult for outside analysts to independently check the projected results.
AP also reported that a key critique coming from Democrats is that the savings could be offset by higher costs for prescription drugs not covered under the “most favored nation” framework. Another line of attack, AP said, is that pharmaceutical companies have increased profit margins while working with the administration.
Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden of Oregon and 17 Senate Democrats proposed legislation in April that would require the administration to disclose the terms of the agreements. Wyden said at the time, “If these deals are so great, why is the Trump administration afraid of showing them to the public?” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told lawmakers his team would share details that did not include proprietary information or trade secrets.
The analysis also draws attention to the scale of U.S. prescription drug spending. AP reported that Americans spent $467 billion on prescription drugs in 2024, according to the most recent government data available, and the administration’s savings model is premised on the idea that foreign countries would also pay more for the medications—shifting revenue streams in a way that preserves drugmakers’ incentives to develop new treatments.
Democrats have also cited related analyses challenging the administration’s story. In April, staff working for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., released an analysis covering 15 companies that agreed to the drug-pricing plan and found combined profits jumped 66% over the past year to $177 billion, AP reported. Sanders’ staff also said the tax cuts Trump signed into law last year “exempted or delayed many of the most expensive drugs” from price negotiations with Medicare, while the Trump administration countered that Sanders’ critique is based on drug list prices instead of the actual prices patients pay.
The White House’s savings estimates follow earlier evaluations of similar approaches by other budget analysts. In October 2024, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a plan like what Trump adopted could reduce prescription drug prices by more than 5%, but said the decrease “would probably diminish over time as manufacturers adjusted to the new policy by altering prices or distribution of drugs in other countries.”