When is TrumpRx launching?
Not on schedule, for one thing.
TrumpRx — the government’s drug pricing initiative, which is at the center of the tariff deals the administration has reached with drugmakers since September — is still not operational, and it’s unclear when it will be.
The White House has said TrumpRx.gov, which is supposed to connect patients with cheap prescription drugs directly from manufacturers, was coming January 2026. With two days left in January, the launch of the platform has been postponed, Endpoints News reported Thursday.
At a televised cabinet meeting on Thursday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t commit to a timeline for the TrumpRx launch. “That’s going to be happening sometime probably in the next 10 days,” he said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
TrumpRx has been described as a website that will point patients to direct-to-consumer options from manufacturers. As the administration began threatening to put tariffs on pharmaceuticals, nearly every major drugmaker reached a deal with the administration, usually committing to sell some products through TrumpRx in exchange for immunity from the import taxes.
The program allows President Trump to put his stamp on a trend well underway in the industry.
Over the past couple of years, drugmakers have been increasingly selling some drugs directly to patients, which allows them to cut out middlemen and offer the drugs at a fraction of the price for patients paying in cash. This is a particularly popular model for weight-loss drugs sold by Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.
Some drugmakers, like Lilly, Novo, Pfizer, and Amgen, already have direct-to-patient pharmacies in place where patients can get the drugs the companies committed to offering on TrumpRx. Others, such as Sanofi and Gilead, do not.
Merck and Sanofi did not respond to a request for comment sent earlier this week. A spokesperson for Gilead reiterated the company’s intention to sell Epclusa via TrumpRx but did not offer further details.
Diederik Stadig, an economist at European bank ING, said in a recent report that the cost savings realized by TrumpRx should be modest. He estimated that excluding GLP-1s (which are already widely available through cash-pay channels), it would save $1.9 billion, compared to the $700 billion US pharmaceutical market.
“In short, these deals represent ongoing circumventions rather than structural reform of the complex way in which American consumers get their medication,” he wrote. “We therefore expect list prices in the US to keep increasing in the coming years.”
