Trump orders stockpiling of essential medicine ingredients

The White House has ordered the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to draw up a list of medicines that are deemed critical for US public health, and store a six-month supply of the ingredients needed to make them.

The executive order from President Donald Trump calls on the HHS' Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) to prepare the list of around 26 essential medicines within 30 days.

It also orders ASPR to update a 2022 list of 86 essential medicines and come up with a plan for acquiring and stockpiling a six-month supply of their active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs).

The move is part of a concerted effort by Trump to reduce the US' reliance on imported medicines and ingredients, given that 60% of finished medicines and 90% of APIs are currently produced overseas.

Trump has used the threat of pharma sector-specific tariffs to encourage drugmakers to set up manufacturing plants within the US – a move that has already resulted in investment commitments from a string of big pharma groups, including AstraZeneca, AbbVie, Roche, Novartis, Eli Lilly, and Johnson & Johnson – helped by efforts to cut the red tape involved in setting up and upgrading facilities.

The executive order says that "stockpiling APIs is advantageous as APIs are generally lower-cost and have longer shelf lives than the finished drug products they make."

It also claims that creating the stockpile will "insulate the US from the concentration of foreign, sometimes adversary, nations" that are involved in supplying the starting materials used to make APIs.

Many of these ingredients are made in factories in China, which has been trading hefty tariff threats with the US in the last few months, although – for now at least – a truce is holding.

APIs sourced and stored in the programme should come from domestic manufacturers "where possible," according to the order, which indicates that the HHS budget will cover the project's costs. However, it is also acknowledged that pharma's complex supply chains will be hard to reconfigure within a single presidential term.

Earlier this week, AbbVie said its $10 billion pledge to boost US domestic manufacturing includes a $195 million investment in a new API facility at its North Chicago campus.

Trump said the move builds on the launch in his first term in office of the Strategic Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients Reserve (SAPIR) stockpile, which emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The aim now is to have the existing SAPIR repository ready to begin receiving and storing API supplies within 120 days, with a second repository set up a year later.