Stocks for the food and pharmaceutical industries plummeted Friday immediately upon President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
If confirmed as head of HHS, Kennedy will oversee a nearly $2 trillion department responsible for the administration of federal health insurance programs in addition to regulatory agencies governing food and medicine. HHS holds jurisdiction over the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), making HHS a primary recruitment ground for the pharmaceutical companies’ revolving doors of influence. Kennedy, who ran for president and then campaigned for Trump as a chief antagonist of Big Pharma, has the industry bracing for generational changes threatening Wall Street’s bottom line.
Lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee, however, will vote first on Kennedy’s nomination after raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry now concerned about Kennedy’s plans to gut predatory advertising practices and eliminate taxpayer subsidies.
While most Republican senators have remained largely silent on how they might vote on Kennedy’s confirmation, pharmaceutical lobbyists are almost certainly calling lawmakers after drug money lined campaign coffers of both parties.
According to a Federalist analysis of industry donations to members of the Senate Finance Committee compiled by OpenSecrets, pharmaceutical companies contributed more than $6.7 million between 2019 and 2024 to lawmakers who will determine whether Kennedy gets a full vote by the upper chamber. Republican senators took more than twice as much industry money, though five members were excluded from The Federalist’s analysis because two lost their recent races, two are retiring, and one, Sen. George Helmy of New Jersey, was appointed just a little over two months ago. […]
— Read More: thefederalist.com
