A centerpiece of President Trump's push to make prescription medicines more affordable is a government website for drug discounts that carries his own name.TrumpRx, launched in February, now boasts 92 deals on brand-name prescription drugs made by pharmaceutical companies that announced highly publicized agreements with the Trump administration.Loading...But nearly six months since the website's launch, those deals on TrumpRx represent fewer than 12% of the more than 800 brand-name drugs made by the participating pharmaceutical companies.
A wide range of medicines — including treatments for inflammatory conditions, HIV and cancer — aren't offered by TrumpRx, according to an NPR analysis of a database of drugs on the market maintained by the Food and Drug Administration.Stay up to date with our Up First newsletter, sent every weekday morning."The key takeaway is that most of these companies are doing this for a small number of products and in a limited setting," says Dr.Ben Rome, a health policy researcher and physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
"They're not engaging to do this on a large scale."TrumpRx's origins go back to the Trump Administration's May 2025 executive order aimed at bringing American drug prices in line with or below what other wealthy countries pay.Last summer, the administration sent letters to 17 drug companies with a list of demands.The demands included selling drugs directly to consumers at lower prices, which is something some drug companies, such as Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, had already started doing.Drugmakers had 60 days to meet the administration's demands voluntarily, or, the letters stated, "if you refuse to step up, we will deploy every tool in our arsenal to protect American families from continued abusive drug pricing practices."Then came the closed-door negotiations, which included the threat of tariffs stemming from an investigation into whether pharmaceutical imports posed a threat to national security.Alt...