US industry braced for change as election looms

As the US gears up to select a new president in November, representatives from the chemistry-using industries have mixed feelings about their prospects under either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

The prevailing sentiment among academic scientists and research advocates across the country is that another four-year term for Trump would be disastrous. Trump’s record of slashing environmental regulations, instituting immigration policies that made it harder to attract foreign talent, and disrespect for the role of science, data and evidence in policymaking are particularly worrying researchers and their institutions.

While industry representatives share some of those concerns, they also view the slowdown in regulations under the former president relatively favourably. Trump’s policy of removing two regulations for every one that his administration introduced would be ‘a very big positive if he gets back in as president,’ says Eric Byer, president of the Alliance for Chemical Distribution (ACD), which represents US chemical distributors. ‘What we’ve seen with [president Joe Biden] has been probably the most challenging regulatory climate ever for our industry.’

We are never afraid to comply with regulations, as long as they are warranted and justified

Eric Byer, Alliance for Chemical Distribution

George Washington University’s regulatory centre has calculated that in April 2024 the Biden administration finalised 66 new regulations. That’s more than any previous month during his term and nearly five times the average of the preceding 38 months. ‘We are never afraid to comply with regulations, as long as they are warranted and justified in terms of the safety and security,’ Byer states. ‘But plenty of these rules are not justified, in our opinion.’

Byer predicts the same or worse under Harris, based in his experience dealing with her as vice president and as California’s attorney general. ‘She was pretty tough, and she’s very much a green, environmental-minded person, and that’s all well and good but you’ve also got to recognise the impact on businesses that are doing a lot for the local community – providing high quality jobs and paying a fair amount of tax revenue into the system,’ he says. A Harris administration would likely issue more rules related to clean water, air and soil, among other areas, according to Byer

The chemical industry is also concerned about trade tariffs on Chinese goods that increased under Trump, were continued by Biden and would likely be maintained under Harris. ‘Trump and Biden were pretty much eye-to-eye on that and so I’m fearful that we will continue to see those tariffs in place – they have been costly for our members,’ says Byer. It is hard for small businesses, that have import products from abroad owing to the global nature of chemical supply chains, to comply with these tariffs, he notes.

[Harris] is also very clear that science agencies need to be independent, which is to the benefit of patients and the [biotech] industry

Jeremy Levin, Ovid Therapeutics

But former chairman of the Biotechnology Innovation Organisation Jeremy Levin, the current chief executive of New York-based biopharmaceutical company Ovid Therapeutics and past chief executive of Teva Pharmaceuticals, has a different take. Levin is concerned about what he describes as Trump’s ‘persistent endeavours’ to reduce the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which he sees as the biotech industry’s innovation incubator, and his ‘assaults’ on the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) independence. ‘The FDA is a is a gold standard for understanding the risks of medicines and their advantages … and the Trump administration endeavoured to influence it significantly with political steps,’ Levin states. For example, he notes that Trump launched a programme during the Covid-19 pandemic to develop a Sars-CoV-2 vaccine, but says the administration wanted to accelerate approval without all the scientific data so that it would be ready before the 2020 election. ‘The political process was decidedly an intrusion at that stage and we can expect the same again under Trump,’ Levin says.

This could all add up to more problems for the biotech sector under a second Trump term than under Harris, Levin suggests. ‘There’s little doubt that Harris wants to increase the NIH budget, in other words this is essentially the pro-innovation side,’ he states. ‘She is also very clear that science agencies need to be independent, which is to the benefit of patients and the industry.’

Despite seeing Harris as the ‘pro-science’ candidate, Levin points out that both she and Trump have expressed interest in significantly reducing drug prices. He suggests that Harris, empowered by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, might be ‘a little bit more extreme’ in this area.

Innovation depends on predictable and reasonable pricing, Levin says. ‘So the real concern for biotech, whether it be a Trump or a Harris administration, will be the extent to which any such intrusions on pricing will impact the incentive to invest in new medicines. If they are extensive and unpredictable, investment will go down in certain sectors.’