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By Dawn Kopecki, Jarrett Renshaw, Sabrina Valle and Ernest Scheyder
NEW YORK, October 2 (Reuters) -Eli Lilly was asked to produce more insulin; Pfizer to produce more of its top-selling cancer drug Ibrance and its cholesterol drug Lipitor; and London-based AstraZeneca to consider a new headquarters in the U.S., according to two sources.
Pharmaceutical executives are getting near-daily calls from staff at the White House - including Chief of Staff Susie Wiles - and senior figures at agencies like Health & Human Services and the Commerce Department, two sources familiar with the matter said.
But pharmaceutical companies are the tip of the iceberg.
The Trump administration is pursuing deals across up to 30 industries, involving dozens of companies deemed critical to national or economic security, according to more than a half dozen people familiar with the talks.
In some cases, the administration is offering tariff relief in exchange for concessions, revenue guarantees, or taking equity stakes in troubled companies, among other types of help. The fast-paced dealmaking is designed to deliver political wins for U.S. President Donald Trump before the 2026 midterm elections, the sources said.
On Tuesday, Trump announced a deal with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla to cut drug prices in exchange for relief from planned tariffs on imported pharmaceuticals. "The United States is done subsidizing healthcare of the rest of the world," Trump said in a event in the Oval Office.
Just as important as the deals themselves is the optics – they must be announced from the White House, two sources said.
Eli Lilly learned this the hard way when it excluded Trump from its announcement of two new manufacturing sites in September and got a call from the administration asking why they didn't allow the president to announce it himself.
A spokesperson for Eli Lilly said they were unaware of the interaction with the administration, and said: "as an American company, Lilly is committed to expanding manufacturing capacity in the U.S."
Pfizer and AstraZeneca declined to comment. The White House declined to comment on Eli Lilly's announcement or on specific details of the administration's plans.
It's all part of what White House spokesman Kush Desai has described as a "whole-of-government approach" to dealmaking "to safeguard our national and economic security."
The plan is to use the broad powers of government to push companies to further Trump's goal of moving manufacturing to the United States, reducing dependence on China, strengthening supply chains for critical products, and contributing to the government's coffers, according to six people familiar with the discussions.
Administration outreach has touched disparate corners of the economy including semiconductors, AI, quantum computing, critical minerals, ship building, energy, battery production, pharmaceuticals and freight, the sources said.
The full breadth of the administration's plans have not previously been reported.
Taken together, the planned interventions in the American economy reverse decades of hands-off approach to private enterprise, a defining feature of American capitalism.
"It's amazing that a Republican administration is taking us farther away from traditional capitalism than any other Democratic administration," said John Coffee, professor of corporate law at Columbia University in New York.
$250 BILLION IN FINANCING
The Trump administration is looking to a little-known federal agency, the International Development Finance Corporation, to play a major role in overseeing and financing the plan, two of the people said.
Established in Trump's first term with the BUILD Act of 2018, the agency was meant to provide low-cost financing for food, health and other projects in developing nations.
But a proposal sent by the agency to Congress in June would significantly expand its authority and reach.
The bill would more than quadruple its financing power to $250 billion from $60 billion as well as establish an equity fund tasked with shoring up key sectors, including infrastructure, energy, critical and rare earth minerals and supply chains – pretty much anything "in the economic and national security interests of the United States," according to a copy of the plan reviewed by Reuters.
The agency is still waiting for Congress to approve its budget as well as the confirmation of Apollo Global Management co-founder Leon Black's son, Ben, to run it. A spokesman for Black said he couldn't comment on International Development Finance Corporation matters before his Senate confirmation.
An International Development Finance Corporation official declined to comment on specific deals, but said its mandate is to "mobilize private sector investment for projects that advance U.S. foreign policy and economic interests, including projects that reduce reliance on critical minerals and materials controlled by China."
The administration is also planning to use the $550 billion Japan is giving the U.S. as part of its trade agreement to seed a new U.S. Investment Accelerator run by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a U.S. official told Reuters. Japan has until the end of Trump's term to provide the funding.
Both the Commerce Department's Investment Accelerator and the Development Finance Corporation are said to replace a sovereign wealth fund Trump had originally planned, but has since scrapped, three sources told Reuters.
FEDERAL AGENCIES BECOME DEALMAKERS
At HHS, the search for deals is being led by Chris Klomp, a former Silicon Valley healthcare investor, and John Brooks, a former health policy consultant, with Wiles taking a hand in the biggest pharma deals.
When asked for interviews with Klomp and Brooks, an HHS spokesperson referred Reuters' request to the White House.
Lutnick, a former bond trader who rose to become chairman of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, is Trump's dealmaker-in-chief. He has overseen most of the administration’s biggest deals, including its 10% equity stake in Intel and the "golden share" Commerce received as part of Nippon Steel’s $14.9 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel in June.
Lutnick declined to comment through a spokesman, but he has emerged as a forceful proponent of the U.S. taking stakes in companies.
"If we're going to give you the money, we want a piece of the action," Lutnick told CNBC in August.
He's tapped two Wall Street dealmakers, tech banker Michael Grimes, who joined the administration from Morgan Stanley a few months ago, and M&A lawyer David Shapiro, a former partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, to head up some of the deals, two of the people said.
J.P. Morgan, which helped put together the government's deal with rare earths mining company MP Materials, said in a recent company podcast that it’s convened a task force of commercial bankers, lobbyists and investment bankers to field all the corporate client calls it’s received since that deal was announced in July.
“We've had no less than 100 calls with clients to talk about the MP transaction as well as what this means for other industries,” said Andrew Castaldo, J.P. Morgan’s co-head of mid-cap M&A. “And we've had numerous trips down to Washington to explore those opportunities with the government.”
Shapiro and Grimes both declined to comment through a spokesperson.
Lutnick plans to hire more senior dealmakers from Wall Street in the coming weeks for the Investment Accelerator, the U.S. official said.
At the White House, newly installed supply chain czar David Copley has been running many of the negotiations, while Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg is leading conversations with defense contractors, the two sources said.
Feinberg and Copley declined to comment, and the Pentagon referred Reuters' request to the White House.
Some companies have welcomed the approach, sensing the opportunity to tap federal dollars and benefit from policy initiatives. Others face potential talks with the administration with trepidation.
One executive in the critical minerals industry said his colleagues are "afraid that we walk into a meeting about loans or grants and they say: 'We need 10% of your company.'”
Some are concerned about making business decisions based on policy that might change in three years.
"The No. 1 concern is this may be short lived," said Y. David Scharf, chairman and co-managing partner of law firm Morrison Cohen, which he said is representing some companies in talks with the U.S. government. "Is there an unwind that has to happen if there is a 180-degree opposite view in the next administration?"
Critics say such an intrusive foray into the private sector could upset the nation's free-market ethos and put the government in the role of picking winners and losers.
"It's contradictory to have free-market champions now backing the same state-driven model they used to criticize," said Aldo Musacchio, expert in state capitalism and author of books including "Reinventing State Capitalism.”
The administration sees the equity stakes not as ideological reversals, but as pragmatic tools to de-risk strategic sectors, ensure taxpayer value and restore U.S. manufacturing jobs, three sources told Reuters.
DEALS TAKE SHAPE
While no two deals will look exactly the same, the agreement with MP Materials is a loose template for deals to come, four of the people said. In that deal, the Pentagon took a 15% stake through the Cold War-era Defense Production Act, established a floor price for future U.S. purchases of critical minerals, and got Apple to commit to a $500 million long-term purchase agreement for its recycled magnets.
MP Materials declined to comment.
The administration has turned to different sources of money to finance some of the deals. In the case of Intel, for example, it turned a grant made under the CHIPS Act into a 10% stake through the Commerce Department.
In another case, Greg Beard, who runs a loan program within the Department of Energy, asked Lithium Americas for an equity stake in the company to advance a $2.26 billion loan that was approved in 2021, with the company offering a 5% to 10% stake, Reuters reported last month.
Beard declined to comment through a DOE spokesman, who said the agency "continues to coordinate with various departments and the White House to secure the domestic supply chains needed to deliver affordable, reliable, and secure energy to the American people."
Lithium Americas, which declined to comment for this article, will have the largest source of lithium in the Western Hemisphere when its Thacker Pass mine in Nevada opens in 2028.
At a July 24 meeting at the White House, Trump advisors Peter Navarro and Copley told rare earth and Big Tech executives that the administration was embarking on a pandemic-style strategy to boost critical mineral supplies in the U.S. after China halted exports of magnets and other essential materials earlier this year, according to five people familiar with the meeting.
Mark Jensen, CEO of mineral refiner ReElement Technologies, was among those present. “They want to see projects that are credible and where there are viable partnerships,” he said.
(Reporting by Dawn Kopecki and Sabrina Valle in New York, Jarrett Renshaw in Washington, DC, and Ernest Scheyder in Houston. Editing by Paritosh Bansal and Michael Learmonth)
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