When Democrats were grappling with sky-high inflation just a couple of years ago, Donald Trump called their plans to fight price gouging by American companies tantamount to communism.
Now that it’s the Republican Party in the affordability hot seat, Trump Cabinet members — and GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill — are doing much the same, laying into CEOs and calling for new regulations and antitrust suits.
“They are making money hand over fist,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said of insurance companies at a Thursday Ways and Means Committee hearing. Later, he agreed with House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) that the Federal Trade Commission needed to start bringing some antitrust suits against health industry firms.
Facing a rising cost of living that threatens their chances to hold onto their majorities in Congress in November, Republican members of Congress and Trump officials testifying before their committees Thursday repeatedly made their longtime allies in industry the scapegoat. It was yet another indication of how much Trump’s populist politics have changed the party of business, and how deep a hole polls show Republicans are in right now on the economy.
“Industry consolidation with huge companies swallowing up various parts of the health care system has helped pad the bottom line of big corporations, while doing little to support the health or well-being of working class Americans,” said Jason Smith, the Missouri Republican who chairs the Ways and Means Committee. Smith decried “major health insurance empires” and hospital CEOs who’d “driven up prices without expanding access to care.”
Smith is bringing health systems’ leaders to testify before his panel later this month.
At a House Appropriations hearing, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins blamed anti-competitive practices across industries for contributing to an “overarching economic pending disaster” for farmers that has landed as the Iran war causes prices to spike for fertilizer and fuel.
Rollins blamed fertilizer companies for high prices, despite acknowledging the war’s contribution to global economic turbulence, saying that a small group of companies have “basically taken over the market” for agricultural supplies in a way that stifles competition.
Iowa GOP Rep. Ashley Hinson floated her price transparency legislation as a way forward.
Other Republicans on Smith’s panel called out the pharmaceutical and food industries, as well as the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, for the dire state of Americans’ health and for high health care prices.
GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania praised Kennedy’s pressure campaign to get food companies to remove artificial dyes, said the dyes cause cancer, and asked what could be done to regulate the food industry.
Kennedy told him to close a loophole that has for decades allowed foodmakers to introduce new ingredients into their products without federal oversight — the so-called Generally Recognized as Safe standard at the Food and Drug Administration. Food companies say eliminating it will only make food more expensive and stifle innovation.
Foodmakers got little sympathy, though.
Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.), a urologist, said he’d recently treated a 262-pound 8-year-old. He blamed “the terrible, terrible tragedy that has become the American food industry” and said it was sad that weight-loss drugs were some of the top medicines sold in the country.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, acknowledged concerns about the high gas prices the war with Iran has triggered.
Wright repeatedly sought to juxtapose the current price rise with the bigger spike in gas prices that occurred during the Biden administration, while also framing current prices as an unfortunate cost of a worthy goal, disarming Iran.
“This conflict with Iran, bringing it to an end, is removing the largest global threat to future energy supplies,” Wright told lawmakers.
Wright said the Trump administration is doing “everything pragmatic” to tamp down gasoline prices. But Republicans on the committee also sought to blame blue-state and “far-left” policies for increasing household costs — a sentiment Wright also emphasized.
“You want to know where gasoline’s expensive, where electricity’s expensive, look at the blue states,” Wright said.
Industry hasn’t escaped the administration’s scrutiny in the run-up in gas prices. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday during a White House press briefing that he was watching for the sort of price gouging Democrats once decried.
“We are going to be watching the gas stations because they raised prices very quickly when the crude oil prices went up. We hope they’ll bring them down just as quickly as crude oil prices have come down,” he said.