This is part four of a series of executive orders related to health care.
Price Transparency
Actions to Make Health Care Prices Transparent
Feb. 25, 2025
This Executive Order is designed to reinforce actions in the previous Trump administration to achieve health care price transparency. The order directs:
- The Departments of the Treasury, Labor and Health and Human Services to rapidly implement and enforce the Trump health care price transparency regulations, which were slow walked by the prior administration.
- The departments will ensure hospitals and insurers disclose actual prices, not estimates, and take action to make prices comparable across hospitals and insurers. This includes prescription drug prices.
- The departments will update their enforcement policies to ensure hospitals and insurers comply with price transparency requirements.
Legal Actions: None
Accountability in Policy
Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies
Feb. 18, 2025
This Executive Order provides for more presidential scrutiny of the actions including guidance and regulations of independent agencies. The order requires:
- The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to establish performance standards and management objectives for independent agency heads.
- OMB to review independent regulatory agencies’ obligations for consistency with the president’s policies and priorities and consult with the agencies’ leadership and adjust the agencies apportionments by activity and function.
- Independent agencies to create the position of White House Liaison.
- Agency chairman to submit agency strategic plans developed in pursuant to the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 to OMB for clearance before finalization.
For health care, this means that actions at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the health sector are likely to be reviewed by OMB for consistency with the administration’s policies and goals.
Legal Action: None
Implementing The President’s “Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)” Cost Efficiency Initiative
Feb. 26, 2025
The purpose of this Executive Order is to begin to change federal discretionary spending on contracts, grants and loans to ensure government spending is transparent and government employees are accountable to the American public. The EO explicitly excludes direct assistance to individuals, expenditures related to immigration enforcement, law enforcement, the military, public safety and the intelligence community and other critical, acute or emergency spending as determined by the relevant agency head. The order requires:
- Agency heads to build a centralized technological system within the agency to seamlessly record every payment issued by the agency along with a brief written justification for each payment submitted by the agency employee who approved the payment.
- Once the system is in place, the agency head shall issue guidance, in consultation with DOGE, to require that the agency employee promptly submit a brief written justification prior to that employee’s approval of a payment under covered contracts and grants, subject to any exceptions the agency head deems appropriate.
- Each agency head, in consultation with DOGE, shall review all existing covered contracts and grants and where appropriate and consistent with applicable law, terminate or modify covered contracts and grants to reduce overall federal spending or reallocate spending to promote efficiency and advance the policies of the administration.
- Each agency will review contracting policies, procedures and personnel and shall not issue or approve new contracting officer warrants during the review period, unless the agency head determines such approval is necessary. Following the review the agency head shall issue guidance on signing new contracts or modifying existing contracts to promote efficiency and the policies of the administration.
Legal Action: None
Click here to read part one of this series of executive orders related to health care.
Click here to read part two of this series of executive orders related to health care.
Click here to read part three of this series of executive orders related to health care.
