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unidentified
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The front row seat to democracy. | |
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| The latest economic numbers show the cost of making goods in the U.S. has increased. | ||
| The Washington Examiner writes that this jump in the producer price index raises concerns about inflation and the economic consequences of the Trump administration's tariff policies. | ||
| Earlier today, White House Trade Advisor Peter Navarro spoke to reporters about the inflation numbers. | ||
| Peter Navarro, I'm Tom Dempsey with NewsNation. | ||
| What reacts to you about this PPI index? | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| I've got a mission here. | ||
| What I want to talk about at some length is the pharmaceutical executive order that was signed yesterday by President Trump. | ||
| After I get through that, happy to take any questions on that and then happy to talk a little bit about the PPI. | ||
| So let's stay focused on big pharma. | ||
| The reality here, the top line is that Americans' medicine cabinets can't be dependent on foreign imports. | ||
| We know that there's big supply chain resilience issues there. | ||
| And so what this executive order yesterday does is address this problem in three different ways. | ||
| The top line here is we're creating a strategic advanced pharmaceutical ingredient reserve. | ||
| We're, number one, number two, we are trying to stabilize long-term demand through long-term contracts from the government, which is the biggest buyer of pharmaceuticals. | ||
| And three, the broader issue of regulatory reform, we are going to make it much easier for advanced manufacturing, continuous manufacturing, to occur here and make us competitive. | ||
| So that's kind of the thrust of the EO. | ||
| Now, here's the backstory for the American people. | ||
| You have a process which goes in three stages. | ||
| You have precursor chemicals, which are then turned into what's called advanced pharmaceutical ingredients. | ||
| And these advanced pharmaceutical ingredients are then mixed and made into the finished dosage form of the medicines that you get, liquids, tablets, capsules, and everything in between. | ||
| And historically, what we've had is a problem where because of the dumping and unfair trade practices of foreign countries, we have not been good at the precursor chemicals or the API. | ||
| In other words, the first two stages of the three stages that we need. | ||
| As a practical matter, about 60% of our API is made in China and India. | ||
| And India gets most of its precursor chemicals from China. | ||
| So that's the textbook definition of strategic vulnerability. | ||
| I encountered this in the first term with President Trump during the pandemic. | ||
| I was what was called the Defense Production Act policy coordinator. | ||
| It was my role to go out and get as quickly as possible the kind of PPE we needed. | ||
| I had companies like Abbott come to me and say, in order to make their test kits for the virus, they needed certain chemical reagents. | ||
| I had to get that. | ||
| And we learned after China threatened to drown us in a sea of coronavirus that we had significant vulnerabilities. | ||
| The president signed an order, which I urge you to look at from the first term. | ||
| It was drafted in my office, the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy in that first term, that basically started us down the path we're on now today of mapping out all the critical medicines and things we need in order to keep Americans healthy. | ||
| But when Biden took over, they let that ball drop, and we are in a situation now where we have to secure our pharmaceutical supply chains. | ||
| So we take a three-pronged approach to this. | ||
| Follow me closely here. | ||
| Creating this strategic API reserve, the SAPR, right? | ||
| We are going to do that. | ||
| We're going to need a little extra help from Congress, which we're encouraging them to help fund this. | ||
| Generically, we have no pun intended there. | ||
| We have a problem where we need all sorts of stockpiles, whether critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, whatever. | ||
| And for whatever reason, the agencies don't get that. | ||
| But we need to have that with six months of reserves. | ||
| We need to be able to rotate stocks on everything stays fresh. | ||
| So we're going to get that done. | ||
| Secondly, as I spoke a little earlier, when foreigners dump products into our market, it makes it uneconomic for our domestic manufacturers to exist. | ||
| And it's predatory pricing, particularly on the part of China. | ||
| They have actually identified sectors like pharmaceuticals. | ||
| They want us out of business here so that they can have their way with us and the world, essentially. | ||
| So the way we're going to address that is to have the country's largest group of medicine buyers, which is the federal government, in the form of Health and Human Services, Veterans Administration, and the Department of Defense. | ||
| They'll be issuing long-term multi-year contracts for these critical medicines that we need so that producers have assurances that if they make the kind of investments that need to be made, that they will be rewarded with demand from the government. | ||
| So that will stabilize that. | ||
| Then third, again, during the first term, I got fairly active, good pun there, fairly active in advanced manufacturing for active pharmaceutical ingredients. | ||
| And we were able to stand up some plants and get that moving along. | ||
| But as always, one of the problems we have in Inter-America when we try to meet our needs is that there's regulatory problems and delays, and we just have to get that stuff out of the way. | ||
| So we're going to hit this with a three-pronged approach. | ||
| Now, as I'm speaking, the Department of Commerce is also working on a Section 232 action on pharmaceuticals. | ||
| And if, as is almost certain to be the case, the Department of Commerce finds that the flood of imports of pharmaceuticals into this country are indeed a national security threat, there will be tariffs. | ||
| So today's EO, coupled with tariffs, will provide everything the private sector needs in order to bring home our pharmaceutical manufacturing. | ||
| So this is a good day for America. | ||
| America first, America pharmacies first, and that's where we're at. | ||
| So I'll stop there and take some questions. | ||
| Let's do pharma first, okay? | ||
| Give me the courtesy of that. | ||
| And then when you're done with those questions, I'll take one or two on the PPI. | ||
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unidentified
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Let me ask you about those tariffs that you just outlined. | |
| So would those sectoral tariffs be across the board in the sense that the tariff rate is the same person? | ||
| Let me just stop you. | ||
| Let me stop you there. | ||
| That's a work in progress. | ||
| It's all contingent on the investigation and all will be revealed when the investigation comes. | ||
| As a rule, the way to think about this as journalists is the 301 actions by the USTR are generally, but not always, country-specific, whereas the 232s are product-specific. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| What else you got? | ||
| Yes sir, the heavy good question. | ||
| The heavy focus is on the generics. | ||
| The problem we have with generics is that they are generics and they have very, very low margins to make money on. | ||
| So we tend dramatically to underproduce them here, whereas the patented ones, they have big margins and therefore more room to run here in the United States. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
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unidentified
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I just wanted to ask, you talked about incentivizing manufacturers for the pharmaceutical industry to make things here. | |
| But to use that same model for the president's broader tariffs, he wants the tariffs, he wants U.S. manufacturing as a whole to come back to the states. | ||
| But with the next administration, if those tariffs go away, isn't that incentive automatically gone? | ||
| And then don't those jobs just incentivize? | ||
| Did I hear a reporter in the pool actively advocating for a Republican president after 28? | ||
| Is that what I hear, sir? | ||
| Yeah, but that's the point. | ||
| That's why you vote for Republicans. | ||
| We bring jobs home and we will provide stability to your medicine cabinet, to your automobile industry, and everything in between. | ||
| So yes, we recognize that problem. | ||
| I think one thing we learned, which I'll say in seriousness, is that The China 301 tariffs were so effective during Donald Trump's first term that the Biden administration kept them in place. | ||
| It weakened them, but it kept them in place. | ||
| I think who's ever in this House in January of 2029, and I hope and pray for this country that's a Republican, | ||
| they will see that President Trump's tariff policies and strategies have totally transformed the manufacturing landscape here in the United States at the same time that they're providing literally trillions of dollars in order to give us tax cuts, pay for paying down our debt, and everything in between. | ||
| So, yes, it'd be nice if we had 100% certainty, sir, but that's not where we're at. | ||
| You've been patient here. | ||
| We'll go here and then here. | ||
| What's your takeaway from this PPI? | ||
| Sir, come on. | ||
| You're violating the rule here, right? | ||
| We're talking pharma. | ||
| Yes, ma'am. | ||
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unidentified
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You outlined the long-term goal of funds, but in the short term, concerns about increased costs for patients. | |
| What do you say to patients who are concerned that the pharmaceutical costs might rise as a result of these tariffs? | ||
| And is there anything that the administration is planning to or could do to incentivize housing companies from not passing along costs? | ||
| Well, look, the costs that you say, that's the rap we always hear, but we don't see that in the data. | ||
| We didn't see it in the first term. | ||
| So we can cross that bridge when we come to it. | ||
| But I will say one of the things that President Trump is angry about, I think that's the right word, is the fact that big pharma uses the United States basically as its golden goose. | ||
| It engages in what's called cross-subsidization across global markets. | ||
| And because of our status in terms of income levels and how price elasticities work, we pay higher prices for drugs than foreigners in other countries do where incomes are lower. | ||
| That's just wrong. | ||
| I mean, we're not here to make money for big pharma. | ||
| We're here to protect the American people. | ||
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unidentified
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Yes. | |
| How are you? | ||
| How's Mike doing? | ||
| He's doing very well. | ||
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unidentified
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Thank you so much. | |
| How can I help you? | ||
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unidentified
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My question on the Farm Initiative: how many American jobs specifically do you guys have any information on how much that will create? | |
| I'm going to leave that up to our Council of Economic Advisors. | ||
| But what we're doing here is creating trillions of dollars of investment and millions of jobs. | ||
| We'll get a good chunk of that. | ||
| I think that this whole continuous advanced manufacturing revolution that this will help move forward will be a great thing for America. | ||
| But the big beneficiary here is going to be Americans who need medicines. | ||
| And this question earlier about what do you tell Americans about price? | ||
| Look, if you can't get the medicines you need because foreigners are controlling that and using it to try to blackmail America, that's an untenable situation. | ||
| All right, any more pharma questions? | ||
| Anyway? | ||
| All right. | ||
| What would you like to say, Mr. Impatient News Nation? | ||
|
unidentified
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Just what are you going to take away from that PPI? | |
| Sure. | ||
| Just briefly, look, if you look at it, this is the kind of thing I used to do in my previous life, wrote textbooks on economic indicators and things like that. | ||
| What you want to see is whether the PPI numbers will move to the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, which is not always the case at all. | ||
| We also know that the PPI is highly volatile. | ||
| We also know there's going to be some people who are going to try to make it a tariff story, but if you peer beneath the hood of the numbers, there's nothing in there to suggest that tariffs were responsible for a number that was above estimates. | ||
| So this is clearly a case where you just watch the data now and you watch it really carefully. | ||
| And as the boss says, let's see what happens. | ||
| All right, thank you for being with you today. | ||
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unidentified
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When is it causing the idea? | |
| Is the administration possible sanctions against Russia? | ||
| Looking ahead at our live coverage today at 4 p.m. Eastern, a conference on liberalism in the 21st century, where scholars will discuss new threats to democracy from authoritarian leaders. | ||
| Then the United Kingdom's ambassador to the U.S. speaks about trade, technology, and transatlantic relations at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, live at 6.30. | ||
| And tonight at 8.30, more from the Liberalism Conference with remarks by Russian opposition leader and former political prisoner Vladimir Karamirza. | ||
| You can watch all of these events live here on C-SPAN on our free mobile app, C-SPAN Now, and online at c-span.org. | ||
| Congressman Cohen, welcome to the program. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
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| What do you mean? | ||
| Well, I thought you didn't get any money from the government at all. | ||
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| What a disappointment to Elon Musk. | ||
| I'm sure he liked to doge to you. | ||
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| Love C-SPAN. | ||
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unidentified
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Appreciate the opportunity to come out. | |
| You know, I wish we could have a thousand C-SPANs across the media spectrum. | ||
| Unfortunately, we don't. | ||
| I think C-SPAN is a huge, huge asset to America, not just the coverage that we get of both chambers on one and two, but programs like Washington Journal that allow policymakers, lawmakers, personalities to come on and have this question time during Washington Journal. | ||
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unidentified
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So it's a huge benefit. | |
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| Our country would be a better place if every American just watched one hour a week. | ||
| They could pick one, two, or three. | ||
| Just one hour a week, and we'd all be a much better country. |