The White House is advancing a policy that would raise drug prices, stifle medical innovation, and hand China a strategic edge in the race for global technological dominance.

No, Joe Biden hasn’t somehow returned to office. This time, the ill-advised idea — tariffs on imported medicines — comes from Donald Trump himself. Tariffs betray Republicans’ longstanding affinity for free markets and low taxes. And they’d put American patients and businesses in harm’s way. (RELATED: ROOKE: China’s Using Unconventional Warfare To Fight Trump’s Tariffs)

Let’s start with the obvious. Tariffs are taxes. The domestic firms that import goods from abroad have to pay them. And they typically pass the cost along to American consumers in the form of higher prices and reduced supply. When it comes to medicines, those downstream effects aren’t just inconvenient. They’re dangerous.

WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 05: A small business owners holds a sign during a press conference in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Room at the U.S. Capitol on May 05, 2025 in Washington, DC. Senate Democrats gathered to address how U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs were affecting small businesses. (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

Millions of Americans depend on imported medicines to treat serious conditions, from cancer and autoimmune disorders to diabetes and blood clots. If Washington slaps tariffs on those imports, drug prices could soar, forcing patients to pay more for the same product. Some manufacturers might even scale back production or reduce how many drugs they’ll export to the United States. Devastating shortages could result. Either way, patients will suffer. And even when there are alternative, domestically manufactured treatments available — which isn’t always the case — prices for those treatments could still skyrocket.

More than half of the active ingredients in U.S. prescription drugs come from either Europe or India. Taxing those imports would raise costs for domestic manufacturers — and thus lead to price hikes for their wares. Centuries of economic history illustrate the harms of tariffs. Those harms are magnified in the pharmaceutical sector, where patients don’t have the luxury of shopping around. When a specific medicine is essential to survival, a tariff-induced price increase isn’t an inconvenience — it can be a health crisis. (RELATED: ROOKE: American Company Aligns With Trump On Screaming Eagle Economic Policy)

That reality is why medicines have historically been exempt from tariffs.

Some proponents of extending tariffs to pharmaceuticals say that our reliance on foreign countries for crucial medicines threatens our national security. Only by making foreign production financially unviable for pharmaceutical companies can we rebuild our capacity to make drugs here, they claim. But it’s hard to see how making it more difficult and more expensive for elderly prostate-cancer patients to get their meds from Japan makes America safer.

Tariffs also won’t address many of the existing barriers to domestic pharmaceutical production. For example, building manufacturing facilities in the United States can take 10 to 15 years, according to American Action Forum president Douglas Holtz-Eakin. Mandates and regulations slow construction down. By making inputs even more expensive, tariffs may make it even harder and costlier to erect new manufacturing facilities.

Further, the United States doesn’t have the workers pharmaceutical manufacturers need. Eighty percent of drug makers report a mismatch between employee skills and evolving job requirements, according to the nonprofit International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering.

The damage done by tariffs wouldn’t stop with today’s patients. It would extend to tomorrow’s.

If drugmakers have to absorb a portion of the costs themselves, the first casualty will be research and development. Pharmaceutical companies have already said as much. As Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks recently warned, “We have to eat the cost of the tariffs and make trade-offs … and I predict R&D will come first.” That’s not boardroom rhetoric. A recent academic study from the USC Schaeffer Center found that a 10% drop in pharmaceutical revenue could lead to a 15% decline in innovation. That means fewer clinical trials, fewer breakthrough therapies, and fewer cures.

President Trump has framed these tariffs as a way to get tough with China. But they’d actually help the world’s second-largest economy.

China’s biopharma sector is booming. Clinical trials there more than doubled between 2017 and 2021. Chinese firms now develop nearly one-quarter of the world’s new drugs. Beijing is doing everything it can to lure research activity. Making it more expensive to develop medicines in the United States helps China’s leaders achieve their goals.

By taxing our own supply chains, alienating allies like Europe and India, and injecting massive uncertainty into the marketplace, we’re not gaining leverage. We’re forfeiting it.

Sally C. Pipes is President, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is The World’s Medicine Chest: How America Achieved Pharmaceutical Supremacy — and How to Keep It (Encounter 2025). Follow her on X @sallypipes.

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