Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump un­of­fi­cial­ly asked CMS Ad­min­is­tra­tor Mehmet Oz to lead the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s talks with drug­mak­ers to low­er prices, push­ing his "most fa­vored na­tion" pol­i­cy.

“I’d like to ask Oz in par­tic­u­lar, be­cause you and I know each oth­er,” Trump said. “He's a very tough hom­bre, this one, he's tough as hell. And so if you can lead the group — and it's not go­ing to be easy — you're go­ing to have to get in and you're go­ing to have to fight.”

The pres­i­dent’s com­ments came at the con­clu­sion of an event Thurs­day un­veil­ing the MA­HA com­mis­sion re­port on the rise of chron­ic dis­eases in the US. Trump be­gan to un­load on phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies who re­ly on the US econ­o­my to buoy their rev­enue, in ad­di­tion to oth­er coun­tries that have kept low prices.

The US Cus­toms and Bor­der Pro­tec­tion warned drug­mak­ers against try­ing to evade im­port rules by mis­rep­re­sent­ing the val­ue of their prod­ucts, in what ap­pears to be an ef­fort to head off a tac­tic the in­dus­try is con­sid­er­ing ahead of the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion's phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal tar­iffs.

In a state­ment Thurs­day, the agency said that "de­clar­ing in­cor­rect val­ue on im­port or ex­port doc­u­men­ta­tion sub­mit­ted to CBP is con­sid­ered trade eva­sion, and CBP will pur­sue any vi­o­la­tions to the fullest ex­tent pos­si­ble." The state­ment does­n't specif­i­cal­ly men­tion tar­iffs but ap­pears aimed at drug­mak­ers who might try to cir­cum­vent or lim­it them.

End­points News re­port­ed Thurs­day that drug de­vel­op­ers may be con­sid­er­ing us­ing a prin­ci­ple known as the "first sale" rule, which could let them de­crease the val­ue of a drug de­clared at the bor­der, low­er­ing any tar­iff du­ty they would have to pay.

Near­ly one out of every 20 staff in the FDA of­fices that over­see drugs and bi­o­log­ics are gone af­ter the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion cut thou­sands of agency roles and of­fered buy­outs, ac­cord­ing to an analy­sis by the in­vest­ment bank Bern­stein.

To con­duct the re­view, the bank down­loaded an on­line di­rec­to­ry of HHS staff from April 15, and a sec­ond copy from May 15, and com­pared list­ings of work­ers at CDER and CBER. It iden­ti­fied 456 CDER or CBER em­ploy­ees — 4% of CDER and 6% of CBER — who no longer ap­peared in the di­rec­to­ry and pre­sum­ably no longer work at the cen­ters.

"We be­lieve these ex­its will put fur­ther strain on an FDA that has al­ready shown signs of de­clin­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty," the Bern­stein an­a­lysts said, point­ing to missed PDU­FA dates (and sub­se­quent ap­provals) for both the No­vavax Covid-19 vac­cine and the Nu­cala COPD la­bel ex­pan­sion.

The Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion has been barred from car­ry­ing out its sweep­ing plan to re­struc­ture and down­size the De­part­ment of Health and Hu­man Ser­vices, fol­low­ing a court or­der that al­so ap­plies to about 20 oth­er fed­er­al agen­cies.

The late Thurs­day de­ci­sion by a Cal­i­for­nia judge ex­tends an or­der halt­ing HHS Sec­re­tary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plan, which called for con&s