Trump’s deal with drugmakers was meant to see prices fall. But some companies have been raising them, Senate report says

While President Donald Trump has repeatedly said the prices of prescription drugs would be lowered under deals with drugmakers, a Thursday analysis released by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders suggests that has not been the case.

All but one of the 16 drugmakers involved in the TrumpRx project have continued to increase their prices since the deals were struck late last year and all of the companies have raised the prices of 337 drugs since January 21, 2025, the 11-page report shared with The Independent – which cites data from the price tracking software NAVLIN – shows.

Drugs to treat cancer, multiple sclerosis and cell and gene therapies were among those that saw price hikes. Some annual costs increased by as much as over $14,000 while drugmakers were negotiating the deals with the Trump administration, the data shows.

Sanders, the ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, told The Independent that he agrees with Trump regarding how outrageous it is that Americans “pay the highest prescription drug prices in the world.”

“Unfortunately, despite President Trump’s rhetoric, prescription drug prices in America have only gone up, not down, since he was elected,” the Independent senator said in an emailed statement.

The report also hits at the White House’s TrumpRx online prescription drug platform, saying it “does not appear to provide meaningful savings to patients either” and noting that drugs TrumpRx have “lower-cost generic alternatives” not available on the site.

“Instead of promoting the lowest cost drugs, TrumpRx may actually drive patients toward more expensive drugs,” it says. “That doesn’t benefit patients; it lines the pockets of the drug companies who signed the MFN deals.”

Kush Desai, a spokesman for the White House, told The Independent that the report “fixates on prescription drug list prices, which are meaningless because they do not reflect the actual purchase prices that patients pay at the pharmacy counter.”

“BLS data that’s based on what patients do actually pay for drugs show that prescription drug prices have, in fact, not only declined since President Trump took office, but just clocked the biggest three-month decline since BLS started reporting this data in the 1960s,” he said. “Bernie’s report proves that he either has no idea how drug pricing works in America or that he remains in a delusional state of denial about the unequivocal fact that President Trump is delivering real results for the American people.”

Drugmakers agreed to offer some of their products for a discounted price for people who paid with cash on TrumpRx.gov. The discounts are separate from list prices, which indicate how much drugmakers can charge insurance.

The 16 drugmakers include Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novo Nordisk, Novartis, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Amgen, Bristol Meyers Squibb, Boehringer Ingelheim, Genentech, Sanofi, Gilead Sciences, GSK, EMD Serono and AbbVie.

The Independent has reached out to all of them for comment.

The drugmakers included in the deals have launched 23 new drugs since Trump became president, the report’s data shows. The average launch price of the drugs is $353,000.

And annual profits of the drugmakers reportedly increased by a whopping 66 percent, up from $107 billion in 2024 to $177 billion last year.

But rising prices are hurdles that Congress can help to clear, according to the report. New legislation introduced by Sanders and other senators would require drug companies to lower the prices of their products to the average price of the same products in five peer countries: Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

If the drugmakers did not lower their prices, the government would be required to approve low-cost generic alternatives to the brand name products.

“If the president is serious about taking on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, he should support legislation I introduced to cut drug prices by more than half and ensure Americans pay no more than the Europeans or Canadians, saving over $180 billion a year,” Sanders told The Independent.

Nearly a third of U.S. adults say that they have taken an over-the-counter drug instead of a prescription medication due to high costs and about one in five say they have cut pills in half or skipped doses to save money, according to recent polling data from the health policy research non-profit KFF.

The report was released ahead of the Senate HELP committee’s hearing focused on drug prices. It follows a January analysis by 46brooklyn, a non-profit drug price research firm, that NPR first reported showed the companies had raised the prices of 872 drugs in the first two weeks of the year.