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elizabeth warren
Warren Urges Medicare Nominee Oz to 'Divest From Financial Conflicts of Interest'
"By making these commitments, you would increase Americans' trust in your ability to serve the public interest during your time at CMS—rather than the special interests of companies in your network."
Mar 12, 2025
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday called on Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump's nominee to head the federal agency in charge of Medicare, to divest all financial ties to Big Pharma and healthcare companies in order to avoid conflicts of interest and gain the public's trust.
"Congratulations on your nomination to serve as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)," Warren (D-Mass.) wrote in a letter to the celebrity heart surgeon and erstwhile purveyor of phony weight loss cures. "If confirmed, you will be expected to steward CMS' $1.5 trillion budget in the best interest of the over 140 million Americans on Medicare and Medicaid. Entering this role with financial conflicts of interest would undermine your effectiveness and the effectiveness of the programs you are slated to administer."
"To avoid this, I request that you agree to: divest any remaining financial interests in health-related companies or patents that you will have the power to influence, recuse from matters involving your former employers and clients, and, for at least four years after you leave office, not lobby CMS or join the industries that depend on CMS' work," the senator said.
"Entering this role with financial conflicts of interest would undermine your effectiveness and the effectiveness of the programs you are slated to administer."
"By making these commitments, you would increase Americans' trust in your ability to serve the public interest during your time at CMS—rather than the special interests of companies in your network," she added.
"You have deep ties to companies that could profit from your decisions at CMS," Warren noted. "You currently serve as a managing member or adviser of multiple healthcare and pharmaceutical firms with a financial stake in CMS policy, including how the agency sets payment rates and coverage determinations for Medicare and Medicaid."
Warren continued:
You also use your public platforms—including your website, TV show, TikTok, and Instagram pages—to promote drugs, such as Ozempic, produced by pharmaceutical companies that are currently seeking expanded CMS coverage approval and that are subject to government drug negotiations—which you would be responsible for conducting. You have been paid to push your show's viewers to enroll in the private alternative to Medicare, Medicare Advantage—a program run by private health insurers that overcharged CMS by at least $83 billion in 2024 alone.
Doctors have critiqued you for allegedly "promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain." Furthermore, much of your financial portfolio (worth at least $98 million) is invested in healthcare and pharmaceutical companies whose value is tied to CMS' regulatory work.
Last December, the watchdog Accountable.US revealed that Oz had invested as much as $56 million in three companies with direct CMS interests. In 2022, Oz's single biggest healthcare holding was up to $26 million in Sharecare, a digital health company Oz co-founded, and which became the exclusive in-home supplemental care program for 1.5 million Medicare Advantage customers.
On Tuesday, the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen published a research brief examining the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political lobbying by Medicare Advantage companies ahead of Oz's confirmation hearing, which is scheduled for Friday morning.
Warren and other Democratic lawmakers previously pressed Oz on his advocacy for Medicare privatization, including a 2020 call for enrolling all U.S. seniors in Medicare Advantage plans.
Last month, Oz pledged to divestfrom insurance companies and drugmakers and step down from his advisory positions if his nomination is confirmed.
"I appreciate that you have agreed to divest much of your portfolio and resign from your advisory posts," Warren wrote. "Still, given your close ties to the industry that you would regulate, if you are confirmed, the public would have reason to question your impartiality and commitment to serving the public's interest."
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Senators Want to Know Why RFK Jr. Dined With Pharma Execs at Trump's Private Club
"You owe the American public an explanation for why you took part in PhRMA's influence-peddling events with President Trump," wrote Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, and Bernie Sanders.
Mar 11, 2025
A group of progressive U.S. senators on Monday pushed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, to disclose what he and President Donald Trump discussed with pharmaceutical executives at recent private dinners as the industry pressures the new administration to end Medicare drug price negotiations.
In a letter to Kennedy, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) pointed to Wall Street Journalreporting from last month on the millions of dollars that healthcare industry executives spent to dine with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida ahead of his inauguration.
Kennedy, according to the Journal, "attended several of the dinners, but largely stayed quiet as Trump and others talked."
Warren, Wyden, and Sanders wrote to Kennedy that "the dinners may have served as an opportunity for Big Pharma to gain insider access to both you and President Trump" and asked the HHS chief to reveal information about the meetings with industry executives, including how many there have been since the November election and whether Medicare drug price negotiations or other critical matters were discussed.
"Big Pharma stands to profit immensely from a second Trump administration, especially if they can convince you and President Trump to abandon policies like Medicare drug price negotiations and patent reform that would save Americans hundreds of billions of dollars on lifesaving drugs," the senators wrote. "Indeed, the executives that attended these dinners have called on him to 'pause drug negotiations'—negotiations that are expected to save taxpayers $100 billion by 2032."
"You owe the American public an explanation for why you took part in PhRMA's influence-peddling events with President Trump, what happened at these meetings, and whether they will affect your commitment to ensuring that Americans receive the relief they deserve from high drug prices," the senators added.
RFK Jr. said he'd "clean up corruption" as HHS Secretary. So why'd he have dinner with Big Pharma executives at Mar-a-Lago with Trump? The American people deserve to know what kind of deals might have been made at those "million-dollar" dinners.
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— Elizabeth Warren (@warren.senate.gov) March 10, 2025 at 7:29 PM
The Journal reported that the CEO of Pfizer, which pumped $1 million into Trump's inaugural committee, was among the executives who attended the private Mar-a-Lago dinners. Eli Lilly's chief executive also joined at least one of the dinners.
Though Kennedy, an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, has vocally criticized Big Pharma and its political influence, the industry did not lobby against his nomination to lead HHS, which oversees the Medicare drug price negotiations that began during the Biden administration.
Last month, the head of the pharmaceutical industry's biggest lobbying group and several pharma CEOs met with Trump as part of a campaign to weaken the price negotiations, which threaten drugmakers' ability to jack up prices at will.
The negotiations have yielded significant results, but Trump's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—an agency within HHS—has signaled it is open to altering the program.
"The Trump administration's statement is far from an embrace of drug price negotiation," Wyden and other senators warned earlier this year, "and appears to be opening the door to changes that could undermine Medicare's ability to get the best price possible on drugs."
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Warren Demands Big Tech CEOs Come Clean on Cozying Up to Trump for Corporate Tax Giveaways
Given that "American taxpayers will shoulder the burden of tax cuts" for major tech companies, she argued, "they deserve answers."
Mar 06, 2025
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren this week sent letters to five Big Tech executives—including the world's three richest individuals—to sound the alarm about their "personal and financial ties to the Trump administration" and how they "may be exploiting" those relationships for billions of dollars in corporate tax breaks.
The Massachusetts Democrat's targets include Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the wealthiest person on Earth and head of President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, which is leading the administration's effort to dismantle the federal bureaucracy.
She also wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta—which owns Facebook and Instagram—as well as Amazon.com founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos. As of Thursday, they are respectively the second- and third-wealthiest people on the planet. Warren's final two letters went to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet, Google's parent company.
"This $75 billion windfall is only one slice of the billions of dollars that you stand to gain from Republican efforts to lower your taxes while raising costs for working families."
Warren and other Democrats on Capitol Hill are intensely critical of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which congressional Republicans passed and Trump signed in 2017. The law was largely crafted to serve rich individuals and businesses, including by slashing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%.
Now that the GOP has regained control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, its members are aiming to extend expiring provisions of the TCJA—funded by gutting programs for the working class.
As Warren's office noted in a Thursday statement, the TCJA ended "a corporate tax break known as research and development (R&D) expensing to help pay for their tax cuts for the ultrawealthy. This tax break allowed companies to deduct the total cost of their R&D expenses immediately, instead of deducting them over time, as is the standard practice in the tax code."
"This change was one of the few parts of the 2017 bill that forced companies to pay higher taxes," her office explained. "Now, corporations want to revert back to the pre-2017 rules—and not only do corporations want to apply immediate R&D expensing to future tax years, but they are also pushing to retroactively apply these deductions to 2022, 2023, and 2024."
Warren's letters cite a recent independent analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which found that retroactive application of R&D expensing alone would slash each company's tax bill by billions of dollars—specifically, Tesla: $2.5 billion; Meta: $15 billion; Amazon: $22 billion; Apple: $10 billion; and Alphabet: $24 billion.
In other words, Warren wrote, "collectively, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Tesla are projected to win $75 billion if Congress awards them retroactive R&D tax expensing—nearly double what the federal government spends on child nutrition programs each year and a fantastic return on investment for the millions you have spent lobbying on the tax fight."
"And this $75 billion windfall is only one slice of the billions of dollars that you stand to gain from Republican efforts to lower your taxes while raising costs for working families," she continued, pointing out that GOP lawmakers may "succeed in lowering the corporate tax rate even further, as President Trump has sought, or in handing out other tax giveaways to massive corporations."
Given that "American taxpayers will shoulder the burden of tax cuts" for major tech companies, "they deserve answers," argued Warren, a member of the Senate Finance Committee. She demanded responses to a list of questions by March 19.
Warren's inquiries include how much the companies are spending on lobbying for Republicans' tax legislation, and the R&D provision specifically; which trade associations, lobbying coalitions, or similar entities that they are a part of; and how much they have given, directly or indirectly, to federal elected officials who are advocating for corporate tax giveaways.
The senator also asked "exactly how much" of the retroactive tax breaks that the tech giants would put toward R&D investment and how they expect it will impact the companies' outlook for stock buybacks and executive compensation.
The potential tax law change is just one way Republican control of the federal government could benefit Big Tech. As the watchdog Public Citizen highlighted Tuesday, Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Tesla are among dozens of companies with ties to the Trump administration that could benefit from its efforts to end corporate probes and enforcement actions.
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