The appropriate rule of law has been the driver of American innovation for the last 250 years. Government protects inventors while also staying out of their way. Before these protections, “any man might instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. The patent system changed this,” Abraham Lincoln once famously said, “and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things.”
The Trump administration has a clear agenda on American biotech. After the coronavirus scare showed us the importance of onshoring our medical capacities, the Administration has drawn more than $370 billion of pharmaceutical manufacturing back to American shores and has championed reform of the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to cut delays that slow clinical trials without harming the agency’s gold standard.
The goal is to ensure America remains the best place on earth to discover, test, and make medicines.
A recently proposed rule from the Treasury Department threatens to move America in the opposite direction. The Comprehensive Outbound Investment National Security (COINS) Act, passed in December 2025 as part of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), seeks to protect American interests by limiting investments in sensitive sectors made in countries deemed adversarial, such as China. While the original scope of the law was more narrowly focused on technologies like supercomputing and AI, COINS gave the Treasury Department discretion to add restrictions on new sectors.
Treasury’s new proposal to include biotech under these restrictions treats “pharmaceutical compounds” as a prohibited technology for transactions with countries of concern. The proposed definition covers a wide range – from vaccines to cell and gene therapies, and the delivery systems for them all. In practice, it would become harder for American patients to access promising medicines and hand China even more control over how those medicines are developed and who gets them.
When a U.S. manufacturer partners with another company on a new therapy, it invests in additional American research and trials – increasing U.S. patients’ access to breakthrough therapies and quicker post-approval access. Restricting those partnerships doesn’t stop Chinese science. It leaves Beijing in the driver’s seat, deciding which treatments move forward and for whom, at the very time they’ve put their foot on the gas. Since 2022, the number of first-in- class drug candidates from Chinese companies has increased by 360 percent, compared to just 100 percent-150 percent for companies in the U.S., Japan, and the European Union.
In the context of China’s rapid rise in biotech, the proposed expansion of COINS undercuts the White House’s goal to increase American competitiveness. The Administration’s prior reforms intended to make American systems faster and more competitive. Consider Operation TrialBlazer, an initiative of the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to “modernize clinical research, speed up early- and late-stage drug development, and maintain U.S. leadership in biomedical innovation.”
A rule that cuts off access to promising early science works against these clear objectives.
The proposal also strains the national security goal that the COINS Act originally intended to achieve. The law empowers Treasury to add technologies beyond the originally named sectors only if they enable an adversary’s military, intelligence, surveillance, or cyber capabilities. Sweeping in all pharmaceutical compounds makes the framework less credible, undermines existing efforts to speed U.S. research and discovery, and threatens to hand over biotech supremacy to China.
There is a better path to addressing legitimate concerns of national security when it comes to China and other foreign adversaries. Washington should target those concerns around AI, supercomputing, and other sectors of particular national importance with narrow rules. Then it should do what a competitive country does: lower clinical trial costs, speed drug approvals without weakening safety protocols, and maintain America’s status as the place where the best science reaches patients first.
Maintaining our edge in biotechnology is a national security interest. And the U.S. cannot fall victim to the anti-competitive practices of Europe, where over-regulation has led to negative consequences both for industry and population health outcomes.
America’s regulatory framework must continue adding the fuel of interest to the fire of genius. If we are worried about China’s pace, the answer is for us to move faster, not to move the finish line backward for everyone. Doing so will cause American innovation and leadership in biotech to suffer, and so will the patients and their families relying on breakthroughs made here in the U.S.
Jared Whitley is a longtime D.C. politico, having worked in the U.S. Senate, White House, and defense industry. He has an MBA from Hult business school in Dubai. This year, the Society of Professional Journalists named him among the best columnists in the Intermountain West.