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Highlights:
- Big Pharma set a lobbying record in 2025, with the pharmaceutical and health industry spending $456.9 million on federal lobbying — a 16.7% increase from 2024.
- Pharma’s spending shows no signs of slowing in 2026, with drugmakers and industry groups already reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying expenditures this year.
- Industry trade group PhRMA is a major force behind the spending, bringing in more than $520 million in 2024 and retaining more than 40 lobbying firms despite having just 30 members at the time.
- PhRMA’s decision to hire former U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor as its next CEO highlights the organization’s effort to bring high-level political and policy expertise to its lobbying operation.
- Industry lobbying extends beyond legislation to FDA decisions and executive-branch policy, with reporting pointing to efforts to influence drug approvals, pricing policies and regulatory decisions under the Trump administration.
Big Pharma set a new record for lobbying spending in 2025 — and 2026 is shaping up to be another year of big spending, as the industry seeks to influence U.S. healthcare policy.
The pharmaceutical and health industry combined spent $456.9 million on lobbying expenses in 2025, according to OpenSecrets, up 16.7% from 2024. According to The Boston Globe (citing STAT), it was the largest-ever single-year increase in lobbying spending.
This spending was part of what OpenSecrets called a “record” $868 million in lobbying outlays by the healthcare sector in 2025.
Big Pharma’s leading trade group — the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) — led the way, spending nearly $38 million on lobbying last year, a 22% increase from 2024, according to Politico. PhRMA was joined by “nine of the 13 U.S. drugmakers on the Fortune 500,” who reported “their highest spending in at least a decade” on lobbying.
There are no signs of a slowdown. OpenSecrets data show the pharmaceutical industry has reported $245.7 million in lobbying expenses so far this year, part of the $459.3 million the health sector overall has spent in 2026.
PhRMA spent a reported $19.8 million in lobbying expenses in 2026, ranking third among business and trade organizations this year — a position it also held in 2025, when it spent $38.19 million.
Among drugmakers, Eli Lilly has spent over $7 million on lobbying this year. Pfizer has spent $6.62 million, and Merck has spent $6.58 million.
According to OpenSecrets, PhRMA’s record spending bucked the overall trend, in which “some of Washington’s biggest spenders, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Realtors, cut back from their 2024 lobbying expenditures.”
Big Pharma ‘using its enormous profits to influence politicians’
The Congressional Times described the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying spending in 2025 not as an “aberration” but as “the apex of a sustained, institutionalized expenditure pattern stretching back more than two decades” in which the industry sought to capture policymakers and federal regulatory agencies.
Daniel O’Connor, president and founder of TrialSite News, said the lavish spending points to a broader issue of representation and industry influence in Washington.
“The problem is bigger than Big Pharma. Washington has built a system where money buys access, access buys influence, and influence can shape the rules governing American healthcare,” O’Connor said.
For Leslie Manookian, president and founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, Big Pharma’s big lobbying spending shows the industry may feel threatened by Kennedy’s presence in the nation’s top health post and the health freedom movement’s growing momentum.
“First, with Secretary Kennedy in office, more scrutiny is being applied to the drug industry than ever before. Second, with the growing health freedom movement, more focus has been directed towards the drug industry’s products,” Manookian said.
Manookian cited a 2025 poll showing 90% of American voters are concerned about the pharma’s corrupting influence. She said the “pharmaceutical drug industry is feeling the heat and using its enormous profits to influence politicians.”
Jeffrey Tucker, president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, agreed. He said the COVID-19 pandemic was the pharmaceutical industry’s “high-water mark in policy influence — but could also prove to be its downfall.”
“The industry might be panicking about growing public resistance,” Tucker said.
Pharma lobbying group a ‘behemoth of an organization’
To appreciate Big Pharma’s financial might, one has only to examine PhRMA’s financial health.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that despite having “just 30 members in 2024,” PhRMA “brought in more than $520 million in revenue” that year, citing the organization’s most recent publicly available IRS 990 tax form.
According to the Post, PhRMA — which the Post described as a “behemoth of an organization” — also has “more than 40 lobbying shops on retainer.”
With its current 34 members — including AstraZeneca, Bayer, Eli Lilly, Gilead, GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer and Sanofi — PhRMA describes itself as an organization that advocates for “public policies that encourage the discovery of important, new medicines for patients by biopharmaceutical research companies.”
On Tuesday, PhRMA signaled its intent to use its influence to shape policy when it announced the hiring of former U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor as its next president and CEO, effective Nov. 9, according to Reuters.
Cantor, a Republican, served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2000 to 2014 and was majority leader between 2011 and 2014.
According to the Post, Cantor played a key role in helping shape healthcare policy and bipartisan legislative efforts related to healthcare during that period.
The Post cited Merck CEO Rob Davis, PhRMA board chair, who said Cantor’s “unique combination of global business acumen coupled with policy and political experience at the highest levels of government make him an ideal person to lead PhRMA during this critical next chapter.”
For O’Connor, Cantor’s hiring is a sign of legislative capture in Washington. “Patients, independent physicians, scientists and smaller innovators cannot compete with that machinery,” O’Connor said. “PhRMA’s hiring of Cantor only underscores the power of Washington’s revolving door.”
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Did Big Pharma pressure the Trump administration to oust health officials?
Press coverage of Cantor’s hiring suggests that he and PhRMA will focus on pressures to “lower prices” and “navigate the Trump administration’s drug-pricing policies and continued scrutiny from Congress about high drug prices.”
In February, STAT reported that “industry groups have also spent big on messaging tailored to the administration,” including “promoting American dominance in biopharmaceutical innovation.”
But does PhRMA seek more than a stronger focus on drug pricing policy or incentives for drug manufacturing and innovation?
None of this year’s top 10 most lobbied-for bills directly pertain to Big Pharma, researcher and author James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., told The Defender. But “a bill count captures only part of lobbying activity,” he said.
Lyons-Weiler said lobbying may also focus on executive-branch rules, regulations, program implementation and U.S. Senate-confirmed nominations. The “absence of an obviously pharmaceutical bill from a top-10 list therefore does not establish that the spending lacks pharmaceutical policy targets,” he said.
The February STAT report said lobbyists involved in “broader” efforts to influence the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have incorporated an “added political strategy” to their efforts.
These efforts include trying to influence the Trump administration on drug approvals, STAT reported at the time.
STAT cited Disc Medicine, a pharma company that “received an unfavorable decision” from the FDA — and promptly “hired its first lobbying firm” in January to “lobby lawmakers about ‘FDA approvals for rare diseases.’”
In an April interview, Kennedy said then-FDA Commissioner Marty Makary “made the correct decision” in rejecting the drug — but “everybody goes after him because the [pharmaceutical] industry’s so powerful.”
STAT also cited the FDA’s “flip-flop on Moderna’s application for its new flu shot.” The FDA rejected the application in February — but quickly reversed course. The reversal “seemed to only confirm the wisdom” of pharma lobbyists’ new strategy, STAT reported.
During a February interview with podcaster Theo Von, Kennedy said the FDA “was owned by Big Pharma and Big Food, and Marty Makary has changed that now.”
However, by May, Makary was ousted — as were other key FDA figures, including Tracy Beth Høeg, M.D., Ph.D., who served as the agency’s top drug regulator, and Dr. Vinay Prasad, who resigned from the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in April — for the second time.
Pharma pressure may have also led to Prasad’s first resignation, last year.
Prasad had signed off on the rejection of Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine two months earlier. But within two weeks, the FDA accepted Moderna’s application to license the vaccine. In June, an FDA advisory committee unanimously approved the shot.
Last year, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a leading biotech industry trade group, denied any knowledge of a leaked document purportedly containing the minutes of a meeting during which they plotted Kennedy’s potential ouster.
Manookian said these are signs that Big Pharma still holds tremendous sway. “I fear the Trump administration in general — not the Secretary of HHS — is far too deferential to industry, and the secretary’s hands are often tied in many ways.”
“At some point, Americans must ask: Is healthcare policy being written for patients — or for those who can afford the most influence?” O’Connor asked.
PhRMA did not respond to The Defender’s request for comment by press time.
Related articles in The Defender
- FDA Ousts Another Top Official: Who’s Behind the Shakeup — and Why?
- White House Plans to Fire FDA Chief Marty Makary, Sources Tell WSJ
- Breaking: Moderna’s mRNA Flu Vaccine Gets Unanimous Thumbs-Up Despite Risks, Low Efficacy
- Are Pharma Lobbyists Behind Vinay Prasad’s Ouster from FDA?
- Vaccine Lobbyists Deny Calling RFK Jr. ‘Direct Threat to Public Health,’ Declare Support for MAHA
- ‘Key to Revolving Door’: FDA Tells Staff Who Leave for Pharma Jobs They Can Work ‘Behind the Scenes’ to Influence Agency
