Drug middlemen launch attacks against MAGA allies pushing for health care reforms



Pharmacy benefit managers like CVS are going after President Donald Trump's allies who are seeking meaningful health care reforms for their constituents.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) have become the primary target of PBMs, which are threatened by their push to implement reforms in drug costs. Threatened by MAGA allies, PBMs have now escalated these conflicts to legal disputes.

'These massive corporations are attacking our state because we will be the first in the country to hold them accountable.'

RELATED: Who is bankrolling the anti-MAHA movement?

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In April, Huckabee Sanders signed legislation banning PBMs from "engaging in anticompetitive practices" by owning pharmacies. PBMs are tasked with negotiating drug prices between pharmacies and insurance companies, but by buying up pharmacies, they are able to take advantage of the health care system and inflate the cost of pharmaceuticals, pushing competitors out of business, according to Huckabee Sanders' press release.

“For far too long, drug middlemen called PBMs have taken advantage of lax regulations to abuse customers, inflate drug prices, and cut off access to critical medications," Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. “Not any more. These massive corporations are attacking our state because we will be the first in the country to hold them accountable for their anticompetitive actions, but Arkansas has never been afraid to be a conservative leader for America.”

The Pharmaceutical Care Management Association promptly retaliated and filed a lawsuit challenging the legislation, calling it a "fundamentally flawed law" that they say "could shutter pharmacies, restrict access to critical medications for patients and families, increase health care costs, and eliminate jobs."

RELATED: Pharmacy middlemen didn’t break health care — the feds did

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Landry has become involved in his own legal disputes with PBMs. Landry, alongside Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, filed three separate lawsuits against CVS in June for allegedly interfering with legislation that also would have prevented PBMs from owning and simultaneously operating pharmacies.

"PBMs are not health care providers," Landry said. "They are corporate profiteers inserted into the most intimate part of your life and your health."

Although several of Trump's allies have been targeted by PBMs, criticism of the pharmaceutical industry is generally bipartisan.

Mark Cuban recently called out Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for claiming that Big Pharma is responsible for high drug costs when, he says, PBMs are the real culprit.

"It's because PBMs corrupt healthcare," Cuban said in a post on X. "Big Pharma wishes they could set their own pricing. They don't. PBMs control formularies and manipulate prices, in exchange for providing pharma access to patients. It's how they maximize rebate revenue. In fact, 3 PBMs NEGOTIATE MORE THAN 90% OF REBATES for commercial insurance plans. That's your area of expertise, and you have done nothing."

Cuban's criticisms promptly earned the unlikely praise of some of the most prominent voices in MAGA world.

"Didn’t think I’d be RTing Mark for a while, but he’s 100% right on this issue," Donald Trump Jr. replied in a post on X.

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Judge Julia Kobick Who Blocked Trump’s Latest Move Against Gender Ideology Has Deep Connections To Democrats

Applicants can now still select 'X' on a passport application form

White House hammers liberals for gaslighting about LA riots: Burning cities isn't justice — it's chaos



The Los Angeles riots have largely petered out; however, the narrative battle over their nature and significance rages on ahead of the nationwide "No Kings" uprisings championed by billionaire Walmart heiress Christy Walton.

The White House published a provocative, 48-second video on Wednesday juxtaposing audio from liberal news coverage characterizing the uprisings in L.A. as "rallies" and "protests" with images of radicals burning vehicles, clashing with police, and attacking federal agents.

RELATED: It's not a riot, it's an invasion 

  Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

"What's happening in Los Angeles aren't 'peaceful rallies' — they're third-world insurrection riots on American soil," stated the White House.

A previous video shared by the administration provides strong indications of whose statements the White House was refuting, namely Democratic Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), and Alex Padilla (Calif.); twice-failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris; and CNN talking head Dana Bash.

"The reality is we see peaceful protests launching in Los Angeles," Booker told NBC News' "Meet the Press" prior to Trump's deployment of the National Guard. "Remember: A lot of these peaceful protests are being generated because the president of the United States is sowing chaos and confusion by arresting people who are showing up for their immigration hearings."

RELATED: Twin daughters of top Los Angeles Democrat arrested in ICE riots for allegedly assaulting police officer with deadly weapon

 Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images

Padilla emphasized to CBS News on Tuesday the "peaceful nature of the protests," suggesting that the "folks that show up after dark and are involved with the looting and the vandalism — which has no place, it's wrong and we denounce that — are a very different group of people."

Contrary to Padilla's suggestion, a great deal of the vandalism and violence that occurred over the weekend took place in broad daylight.

'Looting an Adidas store isn't justice.'

When condemning Trump's deployment of the National Guard, Sen. Warren suggested that it amounted to a "dangerous escalation" in response to people peacefully protesting — another whitewash of the violence and mischaracterization of the scene on the ground.

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Kamala Harris said in a June 8 statement that the "demonstrations in defense of our immigrant neighbors have been overwhelmingly peaceful," characterizing the lawful actions of the Trump administration alternatively as "cruel" and "dangerous."

Dana Bash suggested that the uprising in Los Angeles was not "a real riot."

 

The White House confronted the doubters with "a few simple truths" about the Los Angeles riots in a statement accompanying its new video, noting: "Looting an Adidas store isn't justice. Burning cities isn't speech. Gavin Newsom isn't a good governor."

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told Blaze News in a statement, "As a direct result of Gavin Newsom’s failed, incompetent leadership, violent rioters have attacked law enforcement officers, lit cars on fire, and engaged in lawless chaos — all while waving foreign flags and declaring their hatred for American law enforcement. That is not something that should be happening in America — and everyone should be able to acknowledge that."

This is not the first time that the White House has posted about "simple truths" on social media.

In a May 2 post captioned "four simple truths," the White House shared a picture of Kamala Harris labeled "not president"; a picture of MS-13 associate Kilmar Abrego Garcia labeled "not a 'Maryland man'"; a picture of the National Public Radio logo labeled "not real news"; and a picture of the Gulf of America labeled "not Gulf of Mexico.

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WATCH: Democrats Who Praised Joe Biden’s Mental ‘Sharpness’ Don’t Want to ‘Rehash the Past’

Democrats insisted for years that Joe Biden was mentally "sharp." Many did so right up to the moment of his disastrous debate on CNN, which made it impossible to deny his cognitive decline. Recent books about the 2024 election have raised alarming questions about the extent to which leading Democrats sought to conceal Biden's obvious decline from the public in a misguided attempt to stay in power. Not surprisingly, these same Democrats who raved lied about Biden's mental "sharpness" would like to move on and never talk about it again. We won't let them forget.

The post WATCH: Democrats Who Praised Joe Biden’s Mental ‘Sharpness’ Don’t Want to ‘Rehash the Past’ appeared first on .

Dems Who Clapped Like Seals For Biden’s Big Pharma Actions Do 180 On Trump Drug Pricing Order

'Donald Trump is all hat and no cattle'

5 Reasons Why Democrats, Not Trump, Are Literally Hitler

Democrats and their media allies have been comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler since 2015. It didn't work. It never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but... it might work now?

The post 5 Reasons Why Democrats, Not Trump, Are Literally Hitler appeared first on .

RFK Jr.’s detractors: Warriors for autistic children — or just friends of Big Pharma?



Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been facing backlash for weeks over his comments regarding the lack of agency many autistic children face, because parents of children who are “on the spectrum” believed he was talking about their own experience.

“Autism destroys families, and most importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children. These are children who should not be suffering like this,” RFK Jr. said. “These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

While those on the left have seen this as an opportunity to criticize the Trump administration, Matt McClowry, 1/4 Black Garrett, and Angela Boggs of “Normal World” are thrilled that RFK Jr. is taking action as promised.


“This is one of the most exciting things for me, the whole Donald Trump second term, putting all these great people in, ‘cause he was going to run for president, right, and people wanted him to get in,” Garrett says.

“I think this is a better position for him to be in because now he’s not distracted by all the other foreign policy and other things that the president has to do. He can do what he’s passionate about and what really needs to be done,” he continues, noting that RFK’s ban on food coloring was a huge step in the right direction as well.

“Get all that stuff out of here because we do have an autism problem,” he says. “Even if we find that it doesn’t have anything to do with causing autism, it’s just not healthy to add all these preservatives and food colorings and the stuff that we don’t need.”

McClowry finds it a little odd that the left, long the party of hippies and environmentalists, wants nothing to do with RFK’s cause unless it’s tearing it apart.

“It’s just strange for me to see Democrats coming out de facto on the side of all that stuff,” McClowry says, before referencing a post on X from Elizabeth Warren.

“I won’t share RFK Jr.’s lies about autism. It’s disgusting and dangerous. If he had a shred of decency, he would apologize and resign. Autistic people contribute every day to our nation’s greatness. To every kid with autism, I’m in this fight with you all the way,” Warren wrote.

“By this fight, she means kickbacks for drug companies,” McClowry comments, adding, “Speaking as a person with autism, I hold a job, I have a family, and I would erase my autism in a second if it were an option.”

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IRS flops on tech, bloats staff, fumbles mission — again



The Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk have kicked up a storm of commentary and speculation. Pair that uproar with the Trump administration’s plan to slash IRS staffing, and you get some of the most hysterical responses yet to the Trump/DOGE reforms.

Only in government does talk of doing more with less — of improving efficiency and productivity — trigger panic and outrage. In Washington, D.C., progress becomes a threat, not a goal.

Instead of whining about the DOGE’s proposed staffing cuts, politicians and pundits should demand the IRS do its actual job more efficiently. That requires systemic reform, not partisan noise.

According to multiple reports, the Trump administration plans to cut around 18,000 IRS jobs by mid-May — a 20% reduction in force expected to save taxpayers $1.4 billion in payroll and benefits next year. Of those cuts, 6,800 already came from terminated probationary employees. Another 4,700 took early retirement.

Critics didn’t wait for results. They declared it “historic,” “unprecedented,” and a sign of doom. The sun, they warned, might never rise again.

But we’ve seen this before. The world didn’t end. In fact, almost nothing changed at all.

In 2011, the IRS reported 94,709 full-time equivalent employees. By 2017 — after five years under the Obama administration — that number had dropped by more than 23%, to 72,803. The sun still rose. The sky didn’t fall.

Despite the staffing cuts, the IRS’ key performance metric — the voluntary compliance rate — barely budged. For decades, the VCR has served as the agency’s primary benchmark. It measures the percentage of taxes paid voluntarily and on time, compared to the total amount owed.

Commonly known as the “tax gap,” the VCR draws bipartisan attention. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle treat closing the gap as a fiscal priority — more compliance means more cash to spend.

Yet, through two decades of staffing shifts and budget battles, the VCR has remained remarkably stable — hovering around 84%, give or take a fraction.

Yes, adding more IRS agents might improve compliance on the margins. But staffing alone doesn’t guarantee better outcomes. What matters is how the agency sets its priorities and manages its workforce to deliver results that actually benefit taxpayers.

In 2012, the Government Accountability Office reviewed how the IRS could improve enforcement and shrink the tax gap. The GAO’s conclusion: The problem wasn’t a lack of staff. The IRS could significantly boost revenue simply by better targeting its enforcement resources.

That’s exactly what the DOGE is about: smarter management, better systems, and measurable results. The private sector achieves this through the pressure of competition. In government, such efficiency is about as rare as a unicorn.

Like every other agency the DOGE has examined, the IRS drifted from its core mission: collecting revenue and enforcing tax law. Instead of focusing on enforcement, the agency expanded into mission creep.

Trump plans to shut down the IRS Office of Civil Rights and Compliance — and for good reason. These bloated bureaucracies have become one of the most redundant features of Washington. The only thing more common than a civil rights office is a federally funded jobs training program.

And like rabbits, they just keep multiplying.

Then there is the Biden administration’s favorite: diversity, equity, and inclusion. Trump has rightly proposed shutting down DEI offices across the federal government. Hiring $200,000-a-year “senior diversity and inclusion specialists” at the IRS won’t close the tax gap — not by a long shot.

In the high-tech 21st century, the IRS still struggles with basic technology.

Just weeks ago, the Treasury Department’s inspector general released a report on the IRS’ Direct File pilot program. The IRS launched the program to help taxpayers file returns from February to April 2024 — and it flopped.

Despite existing free filing options from both the private sector and the IRS, Direct File was pushed forward as one of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) latest policy “experiments.” According to the inspector general, the project cost taxpayers at least $33.4 million — far more than initially disclosed.

The results were underwhelming. Only 140,803 of the 423,450 people who created Direct File accounts — just 33% — successfully submitted returns. Many of those who did lost out. The report noted that Direct File didn’t even allow eligible filers to claim their education tax credits. That’s not a minor oversight — it’s a costly failure and needs to go. Trump last week indicated he will end the program.

In just four years, Joe Biden added more than 20,000 full-time employees to the IRS. Did anyone notice the agency working better? Didn’t think so.

Instead of whining about the DOGE’s proposed staffing cuts, politicians and pundits should demand the IRS do its actual job — collect revenue and enforce the law — more efficiently. That requires systemic reform, not partisan noise.

The Trump administration gets it. It’s time the rest of Washington caught up.

Middle-class Americans thrived under Trump’s tax cuts. Here’s the proof.



As the 2025 fiscal cliff approaches, key provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are set to expire — triggering one of the largest planned tax hikes in U.S. history. If Congress fails to act, the hardest hit won’t be billionaires or Wall Street elites. It will be working- and middle-class Americans who will get hammered.

For years, the left has pushed a false narrative about the TCJA, passed in 2017 under President Donald Trump. They claim it was a “giveaway to the rich.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) even labeled it a “wealth transfer” from working families to millionaires and billionaires. That claim is flatly untrue. The data from the Internal Revenue Service tells a very different story.

Democrats say they care about working families. If that’s true, why are they standing in the way of the very law that lowered the tax burden on millions of middle-income Americans?

A new policy study from the Heartland Institute, which I co-authored, analyzed IRS data from 2017 through 2022 to evaluate the real impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Although the law passed in 2017, it didn’t take effect until 2018. Using the most recent available tax year (2022), we compared data before and after the law took effect to determine how much taxpayers saved across each IRS income bracket.

Since IRS data for 2023 and 2024 isn’t available yet, we used historical averages to project savings for those years.

Big tax cuts for the middle class

The results are clear. The TCJA cut personal income tax rates across the board. But the biggest winners — by percentage saved — were working- and middle-class Americans earning between $30,000 and $200,000 a year. Over the period studied, these families saved thousands.

Here’s the breakdown: From 2018 through 2024, we project that households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 saved around $6,300 in federal income taxes. Those making between $75,000 and $100,000 saved about $8,300. And families earning between $100,000 and $200,000 saved nearly $13,500.

That’s not a giveaway to the rich. That’s real relief for working families.

While high-income earners benefited too, their relief was modest compared to the savings middle-class families received.

In 2022, filers making between $5 million and $10 million saw their federal tax bills fall by just 2.3% compared to 2017. Meanwhile, households earning between $40,000 and $50,000 saved nearly 19%. That’s not trickle-down economics — that’s targeted relief for working Americans.

Overall, the income groups that saw the largest percentage tax cuts were those earning less than $75,000. Within that group, even the lowest-performing bracket — households making between $50,000 and $75,000 — still saved a little over 16% in 2022 compared to pre-TCJA levels. Every other bracket in the under-$75,000 range saved at least 18%.

Perhaps most striking of all, our study shows that the TCJA actually made the federal tax code more progressive. It shifted more of the income tax burden onto high earners while easing it for working families — the very opposite of what critics have claimed.

The IRS data from 2017 to 2022 shows a clear trend. After the TCJA took effect, households earning less than $200,000 paid a smaller share of all personal income taxes, while households earning more than $200,000 picked up a larger portion of the national tab.

Debunking the deficit myth

This contradicts a favorite claim of the left — that the Trump tax cuts would drain federal revenue and explode the deficit. Yes, the deficit has worsened since the TCJA took effect, but not because tax revenues collapsed. The truth is just the opposite.

In 2017, the IRS collected about $3.5 trillion in total taxes. By 2022, that number had jumped to nearly $5 trillion. Personal income tax collections alone reached $2.13 trillion in 2022 — up half a trillion dollars since the TCJA became law.

The TCJA didn’t starve the Treasury. Federal income tax revenues have grown significantly since 2017. What has fueled the national debt and deficit is not a lack of revenue, but out-of-control government spending.

The clock is ticking

Middle-class tax relief is scheduled to expire at the end of the year. If Congress fails to act, the fallout will be severe. Many middle-income families could face tax hikes of 18% or more, costing them thousands of dollars over the next few years. Higher earners would face even steeper increases — an economic drag that would ripple across the entire country.

Democrats say they care about working families. If that’s true, why are they standing in the way of the very law that lowered the tax burden on millions of middle-income Americans? Why are they trying to undo the progress that helped working people climb the economic ladder?

The answer is plain: politics. Democrats have opposed the TCJA from the beginning — not because it failed, but because Donald Trump signed it into law.

But the facts don’t lie. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act worked. It lowered tax rates, fueled economic growth, and helped everyday Americans keep more of what they earned.

If Congress doesn’t step in soon and make the cuts permanent, the middle class will once again be left holding the bill.

Elizabeth Warren Defends Biden’s Mental Fitness With … ‘He Was On His Feet’

'He was sharp'