Groundhog Day

The first business day of the partial government shutdown fell on Groundhog Day.

The HHS spending bill got hung up due to an unrelated fight over how to restrain federal immigration agents in a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security.

Senate Democratic leadership cut a deal with the White House to separate the DHS bill from five other spending bills, including for HHS. The Senate on Friday passed both a package of the five spending bills (including HHS), and a bill funding DHS for two weeks while Democrats and Republicans debate what to do about ICE.

This Groundhog Day might end soon. President Trump seems to have swayed a couple Republican holdouts to vote in favor of advancing the federal funding package, according to news reports.

Should the bills clear the House, the deadline for figuring out the DHS spending bill would be the midnight before Valentine’s Day.

trade associations

$3.1 million

That was the total compensation for BIO CEO John Crowley in 2024, his first year in that role.

Former BIO CEO Michelle McMurry-Heath’s compensation was $2.6 million in 2022. She abruptly left BIO that October following an undisclosed performance review by an outside firm at the request of BIO’s board. Crowley was on the board at the time and headed the search committee that chose him for the job.

Upon taking over, Crowley laid off around 30 employees to focus on new areas, including vaccine education and women’s health, he said in a 2024 interview with STAT. (He declined to disclose his compensation during that interview, but a tax filing for the biotech trade group is now available with that information.)

Crowley made about $10 million in 2022 as the CEO of Amicus Therapeutics, a company he launched in 2005 to find treatments for rare genetic neuromuscular diseases, including Pompe disease, which affects his children.

addiction

‘Spiritual malaise’

Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday provided new details and funding sources for the addiction initiative that he announced last week, Lev Facher reports.

The new details include a program to curb homelessness and plans to involve religious organizations in the government’s response to the addiction epidemic, which he called a “spiritual malaise.”

Lev noticed that Kennedy’s upcoming tour of recovery organizations mirrors his tour as an independent presidential candidate in 2024, when he visited drug courts, sober living facilities, and “wellness farms” while filming a documentary about the nation’s addiction crisis titled “Recovering America.”

Courting GOP lawmakers on MFN

As we await the launch of TrumpRx, top administration officials met with Senate Finance Committee Republicans to push for legislation to codify the president’s most-favored nation drug price plan into law, Daniel Payne reports.

That effort could be taken as a sign that administration officials aren’t sure that the voluntary, murky agreements they’ve made with drugmakers will stick.

Administration officials also pushed last year for most-favored nation provisions in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, but Republican lawmakers quickly jettisoned the idea. The latest effort comes with more attention, as the president himself has publicly asked Congress to pass his health plan.

drug middlemen

PBMs face more disclosure requirements

Pharmacy benefit managers face new, sweeping requirements to disclose the ways they get money from providing drug coverage, Bob Herman reports.

The Department of Labor proposed the rule as Congress is poised to pass legislation that also increases reporting requirements for PBMs.

The Labor Department regulation is designed to help employers understand PBM expenses. The legislation would require PBMs to report some information that is relevant to employer-sponsored plans, but it also would be useful to pharmacies. A major goal of the legislation is to give regulators data that will inform additional PBM regulations.

What we’re reading

As male birth control gets closer to reality, men are lining up for clinical trials, STAT
Lawmakers spend big on home state science projects, Science
Opinion: The EPA just erased a century of public health progress, STAT
ICE halts "all movement" at Texas detention facility due to measles infections, CBS News

Thanks for reading! More next time,