A prominent objective of the Trump Administration is onshoring pharmaceutical manufacturing to the United States to secure supply lines and enable American pharmaceutical self-reliance. In a new insight, Health Care Policy Analyst Jack Leimann considers the myriad challenges to the administration’s strategy, highlighting how its ambiguity unduly complicates its implementation and undermines potential success.

Key Points:

• Given the complexity of the pharmaceutical manufacturing chain, the administration’s failure to articulate how, exactly, it defines onshoring for the industry or how it would measure success compounds operational issues.
• A regulatory environment that incentivizes manufacturers to invest in the United States could strengthen supply lines; punishing them for manufacturing abroad restricts potential supply lines, contradicting the stated objective.
• This insight provides an overview of the manufacturing process, highlighting the many ways onshoring could be interpreted, and demonstrates – even if a definition was agreed upon – there are many challenges that may not yield promised benefits.

Read the analysis.