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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) paused its lawsuit against the three biggest pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) on March 31 after the Trump administration fired two Democratic commissioners.
The pause went into effect April 1, citing “the fact that there are currently no sitting commissioners able to participate in this matter” after former Commissioners Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, who were overseeing the suit, were fired on March 18.
The pause will stay in effect for at least 105 days,and a new hearing date will be set 225 days after it’s lifted, per the order.
The lawsuit’s delay may indicate a shift in how the current administration will approach the drug industry intermediaries, which negotiate prices between drug manufacturers and pharmacies. President Donald Trump previously made bullish comments about PBMs, saying he wanted to “knock out the middleman,” though members of his party removed language on a bill that would have increased regulations on PBMs.
Catch me up. Under the Biden administration and former FTC Chair Lina Khan, the agency published two reports alleging PBMs have a “significant influence” over the pricing of drugs.
For example, the first report from July found that the three biggest PBMs—CVS Health’s CVS Caremark, Cigna’s Express Scripts, and UnitedHealth Group’s Optum Rx—profited $1.6 billion in excess revenue from two cancer drugs between 2020 and 2022.
As a result, the FTC filed a lawsuit against those three PBMs in September, specifically accusing them of upcharging for insulin and putting more than 8 million people in the US at risk of losing life-saving medication.
So, now what? Slaughter and Bedoya are suing to get their jobs back, asserting they were “unlawfully” removed from their roles.
They are just two of many fired by the Trump administration—though not all successfully, as on March 14, two federal judges ruled that tens of thousands of probationary workers must be reinstated.
The remaining commissioners, Republicans Andrew Ferguson and Melissa Holyoak, have recused themselves from the case, according to the order.
Khan posted on X on April 2 that the halt in the case is “a gift to the PBMs.”