President Donald Trump’s new scheme to transform the federal government into a pharmacy is already raising red flags for legal and health experts.
Earlier this week, Trump announced the launch of TrumpRx, a strangely socialist-sounding service where consumers can procure cheap prescription drugs from the U.S. government—just days before Trump’s 100 percent tariff on pharmaceutical products is set to cause prices to skyrocket. Pfizer has agreed to provide prescription medicine through the purchasing platform at a “significant discount” of on average closer to 50 percent, according to a press release from the company.
But not everyone is convinced.
Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy professor at Vanderbilt University, told Mandatory that TrumpRx was “more of a gimmick” to make drug companies happy. In reality, the site is likely “not going to help the average person,” who purchases medications through their insurance. Even with the discounts, prescriptions could still cost thousands of dollars, likely much higher than a typical insurance co-pay.
The White House did not clarify how exactly prices would be determined, and Pfizer’s press release noted that the “specific terms of the agreement remain confidential.”
It’s not just consumers who would be sold short. Independent pharmacists have voiced concerns that the service could hurt their businesses. And The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board excoriated Trump’s move Wednesday as “political extortion” of drug companies, threatening them with gargantuan tariffs if they failed to cut a deal with his administration.
Eliza Orlins, a career public defender and former candidate for Manhattan district attorney who produces social media news-explainers, posted a video Wednesday in which she begged her followers not to enter their personal information into the TrumpRx website. “This is one of the scariest things I’ve seen in 2025—and that’s saying a lot,” she said.
“In order to use the site, you’d have to tell the government exactly what medications you take, what conditions you have, when you refill them,” she explained, noting, “And the White House hasn’t said data they collect, how it will be stored, who gets access, or what happens when the program ends.”
Orlins argued that the discount Trump had promised came at a cost. “That cost is your privacy. Because once you hand over this information, it is theirs forever, and you will never know where it went,” she said.
The Trump administration has a history of playing it fast and loose with Americans’ private information. In August, a whistleblower revealed that DOGE employees had uploaded a copy of a Social Security database onto a cloud server, making the information vulnerable to leaks and hackers. It could also be unwise to let the government know your medical information considering the administration’s attitudes about vaccines and antidepressants.
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