DOGE meets MAHA: Where the New Administration Can Stand Up for Patients and Common Sense
By John “CZ” Czwartacki, Founder & Chairman
President Donald J. Trump is wasting no time right from the start, from one day using ICE to beef up border security, the next securing a half-trillion dollar AI infrastructure investment for the United States. The list goes on. One action in particular boosted the hopes and dreams of patients everywhere: the rescinding of President Biden’s executive order that celebrated the deeply destructive price fixing policies for our healthcare system. This was a huge step in the right direction.
As of today, it’s unclear how much further President Trump will advance our progress. However, common sense says government programs should assess effectiveness for the American people. The same could apply to the law called the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). A pause is a responsible way to fully assess the damage being caused by carrying out this poorly conceived—and dangerously designed—policy.
To an outside observer, a pause is an objective and rational action to methodically evaluate how this law is being enforced.
To a patient such as myself, this could be life-saving. It would stop an experiment with the medications I need to live, preventing a crime that should be called “medical manslaughter.”
Having the health bureaucracy tap the brakes before moving forward with the IRA’s healthcare components is just DOGE common sense. Importantly, it would be a course correction toward making America healthy again. It is not only consistent with the president's mandate to fully understand how each tax dollar is being spent, it’s long overdue.
The money being spent on this program isn’t only wasteful; it’s wreaking havoc on everything it touches: our medical research ecosystem, American global leadership in health innovation, and the hopes of patients like myself for cures.
I understand all too well how devastating it can be to be diagnosed with an incurable illness, without a known hope for relief.
When I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) there wasn’t a single drug available to slow the progression of my disease. Since then, I’ve benefited from several novel, cutting-edge treatments. These were medicines that were discovered and made available to me when American public policy fostered innovations. Sadly, this pro-innovation and once bipartisan climate has effectively been reversed by the IRA.
I know firsthand how harmful abandoning this would be. Shortly after this law was enacted in 2022, I made it my mission to fight for patients—and the cures that could save their lives. My wish is to protect the hope that I was given—for current patients and for people yet to be born.
Almost by definition, the IRA's innovation-killing drug price fixing works against this hope.
Since the IRA has been in effect, medical researchers have continually announced cutbacks and program cancellations in response to the IRA distortions. As of March 2025, 40 research programs and 22 drugs, including cancer, chronic disease, and rare disease treatments, have been discontinued following the IRA’s passage. Moreover, a key life sciences contractor warns that research and development pipelines are expected to shrink, researchers will be laid off, and facilities will be downsized amid investment pullback.
This situation is worsening rapidly. Most recently, the rollout of the initial price applicability year (IPAY) 2027 program announced the next 15 drugs that will be subject to government price fixing. The Biden Administration unveiled this development in its final days before President Trump's Inauguration in an attempt to lock in the program’s implementation and the power it gives the health bureaucracy. Power that results in fewer cures rather than saving lives.
Power claimed under the disguise of the unproven idea of its promise to “lower drug costs.”
As anyone anxiously awaiting a breakthrough treatment can tell you, dollar "savings” are worthless if the cure you need is never created.
While the government’s price fixing has created a monumental setback to the discovery of treatments, it is not too late to restore hope for patients. President Trump has the opportunity to halt the implementation of the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program, saving patients from further destruction of America's healthcare innovation pipeline.
But time is running out. Recently, pharmacists began sounding the alarm that the IRA is creating significant obstacles to their work by hampering their ability to stock currently existing medications. This toxic policy needs to go.
The IRA threatens harm across the board: to Medicare that’s buckling under the weight of these new policies, to patients losing hope with fewer cures in the pipeline, and to taxpayers who have been lied to as phantom “savings” are spent by the government elsewhere.
Our nation should never embrace a policy that was always designed to limit life-saving treatments. President Trump has an opportunity to halt this poisonous policy, rescue Medicare from its devious effects, and stand up for America’s global leadership in health innovation by pausing the IRA's price-fixing scheme. Toward this end, I recently submitted a letter to President Trump and other policymakers urging them to take swift, bold action. What better way to make America healthy again than to restore its pipeline of cures?
This is where DOGE meets MAHA.
For the sake of all patients and their loved ones, I hope they act quickly to stop this devastating program.