If you’ve ever seen a drug commercial, called your doctor about it, and walked out of that appointment with a better treatment plan, you may soon lose that ability. Not because the drug stopped working or the ad was misleading, but because someone in Washington decided you don’t need to know about it.
Buried in the Trump administration’s 2026 Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions — under the coyly deceptive name of “Transparency in Direct-to-Consumer Advertising” — is a proposed rule that would require every prescription drug broadcast ad to air its entire catalog of side effects. Don’t let it fool you: this change would make ads so long, so unwieldy, and so expensive that most pharmaceutical companies will stop running them. The ones that survive will confuse and discourage patients. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s own analysis estimates annual costs to advertisers exceeding $100 million, a burden oddly out of place in an administration that has delivered $211 billion in deregulatory savings.
