Trump Incentivizes Pharmaceuticals to Build Domestic Manufacturing Capacity
Domestic manufacturing in the pharmaceutical industry has fallen considerably in the last decades, with most active ingredient production moving to China and other countries. According to the Food and Drug Administration, this trend largely emerged due to the low labor costs and other factors in the process.
According to statistics by consulting firm EY, the United States imported around $203 billion in pharmaceutical products in 2023 alone. Around 73% of these imports came from Europe, primarily Germany, Ireland, and Switzerland. However, this trend is likely to change in the future.
On May 5, CNBC reported that President Trump signed an executive order incentivizing prescription drug manufacturing in the United States. With potential tariffs on imported medicines looming, the order streamlines the process for pharmaceutical companies to build new production sites in the country.
Trump’s order directed the Food and Drug Administration to streamline reviews and remove unnecessary requirements to slash the time it usually takes to approve manufacturing plants in the United States. According to a White House fact sheet, the order entails working with domestic drugmakers to “provide early support before facilities come online.” CNBC reported that the order also directed the FDA to increase the inspection fees for foreign manufacturing plants and enhance the “enforcement of active-ingredient source reporting by overseas producers.”
The FDA’s commissioner, Marty Makary, said the order would allow the agency to conduct more new manufacturing site inspections with the same resources. The agency would also increase foreign drug facility inspections, going from announced to “surprise” visits. Makary said:
“We had this crazy system in the United States where American pharma manufacturers .. are put through the ringer with inspections, and the foreign sites get a lot easier with scheduled visits, while we have surprise visits.”
According to White House estimates, building new pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity can take 5 to 10 years, which the administration considers “unacceptable from a national-security standpoint.” President Trump said the following about the situation in a fact sheet:
“We don’t want to be buying our pharmaceuticals from other countries because if we’re in a war, we’re in a problem, we want to be able to make our own. As we invest in the future, we will permanently bring our medical supply chains back home. We will produce our medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, and treatments right here in the United States.”
In addition to the FDA, Trump’s order directed the Environmental Protection Agency to “accelerate the construction of facilities” related to drug manufacturing and their ingredients. This order came ahead of President Trump’s potential tariffs on pharmaceuticals imported into the United States, who said on May 5 that he would announce the pharmaceutical-specific tariffs in the coming two weeks. These circumstances have already led to a fresh wave of domestic manufacturing investments from several top drugmakers. However, some pharmaceutical companies are also pushing back on these plans, claiming that the tariffs’ threats are hindering further US investments in R&D and manufacturing.
CNBC reported that, according to an April release for GlobalData, reshoring manufacturing in the industry can result in a more robust drug supply chain, slashing the risk of disruption. However, it could raise drug prices and production costs substantially, leading to affordability concerns.
Our Methodology
We sifted through stock screeners, financial media reports, and ETFs to compile a list of 25 best pharma stocks and then chose the top 12 with the highest number of hedge fund holders as of Q4 2024. We sourced the hedge fund sentiment data from Insider Monkey’s database. The list is ordered in ascending order of hedge fund sentiment.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 363.5% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 208 percentage points (see more details here).
Is Merck & Co., Inc. (MRK) the Worst Blue Chip Stock to Buy?
A close-up of a person's hand holding a bottle of pharmaceuticals.
Merck & Co., Inc. (NYSE:MRK) is a biopharmaceutical company that delivers health solutions to advance the treatment and prevention of diseases in animals and people.
Its Pharmaceutical segment offers vaccines and human health pharmaceutical products, typically therapeutic and preventive agents. Its Animal Health segment develops, discovers, manufactures, and markets a range of vaccines and veterinary pharmaceutical products.
Merck & Co., Inc. (NYSE:MRK) plans to manage the effects of tariffs by opening a $1 billion new plant in the US, expected to open by 2030. The plant will be based in Delaware and will manufacture a range of the company’s drugs sold in the US.
Merck CEO Rob Davis told The Wall Street Journal that this strategic step would ensure that Merck & Co., Inc. (NYSE:MRK) sources its US needs from its US sites. He also said that the company’s decision to invest in domestic manufacturing was driven by “what the current administration is doing and what President Trump is trying to achieve.” The company takes the fourth spot on our list of the best pharma stocks to add to your portfolio.
Overall, MRK ranks 4th on our list of the best pharma stocks to invest in now amid the domestic manufacturing boom. While we acknowledge the potential for MRK as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than MRK but trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.
