President Donald Trump is wasting no time completing the ambitious goals left unfinished after his first term. In less than a year, Trump has taken major steps to reinvigorate manufacturing, lower drug prices and bolster national security.
Soon, he’ll have a rare opportunity to complete another critical piece of unfinished business: ending the exploitation of U.S. businesses by our two largest trading partners, Canada and Mexico.
In the coming months, the United States will undertake a scheduled review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA—the landmark trade deal reached during President Trump’s first term. During that review, the administration will have the chance to restore crucial intellectual property protections that Democrats insisted be dropped after the deal was first negotiated.
I was involved in the negotiation of the USMCA as President Trump’s deputy U.S. trade representative. The president’s goal was to replace the disastrous North American Free Trade Agreement with a modern pact that would protect American workers, innovators and businesses. A central part of that was strengthening intellectual property protections, which encourage investment and innovation by granting creators a temporary, exclusive right to profit from their work.
Yet before the deal could take effect, Democrats in Congress stripped out several key protections. For example, we had secured commitments from Mexico and Canada to provide 10 years of regulatory data protection for certain new medicines. Regulatory data protection provides temporary protection for the confidential information that drug developers share with authorities to prove a medicine is safe and effective before it can be sold. House Democrats led efforts to remove this provision, claiming that stronger protections would raise drug prices.
That’s nonsense. The United States already provides 12 years of regulatory data protection, so the change wouldn’t have altered the U.S. market. Removing it has only allowed Canadian and Mexican firms to more easily copy U.S-made drugs, making it harder for American businesses to earn a return on costly research and development and discouraging future investment.
Regulatory data protection isn’t the only example, either. Democrats weakened other key IP protections negotiated as part of USMCA, undermining President Trump’s original intent and opening the door for Canada and Mexico to undercut U.S. innovators.
Mexico’s failures are especially troubling. In the U.S. trade representative’s most recent Special 301 Report—an annual report spotlighting foreign IP violations—Mexico was placed on the Priority Watch List for “long-standing and significant” concerns, including rampant counterfeiting and piracy.
Mexico has also failed to implement USMCA requirements, including certain measures that would protect pharmaceutical-related IP. Mexico hasn’t complied with the USMCA’s obligations on “patent term restoration”—obligations that are necessary to compensate companies for excessive delays in the government’s approval of patents. Without such measures, companies lose years of protection and revenue, limiting funds for future research.
And Canada has its own shortcomings. It is on the Special 301 Watch List and has weakened patent term restoration with narrow rules that render few drugs eligible. Even more damaging, it continues to impose drug price controls that undervalue American-made medicines and exacerbate foreign free-riding on U.S. innovation.
By fixing prices below market value, Canada—like many wealthy nations—forces companies to absorb losses abroad, making it harder to fund new research and pushing a greater share of costs onto American patients. President Trump is actively working to resolve this imbalance as part of lowering drug prices for U.S. patients—and fixing the USMCA is an important place to start.
The needed reforms are straightforward. Create enforceable, verifiable standards mandating respect for IP. Clarify legal uncertainties, such as the extent of the “Bolar exemption” to patent infringement, which is intended to let generic manufacturers use patented inventions for limited regulatory purposes but not for commercial gain. Restore the 10-year regulatory data protection standard originally negotiated as part of the USMCA in 2018. Require Canada to abandon price controls and devote a higher, fairer level of spending to new drug development. And enforce full compliance with existing requirements, such as patent term restoration.
President Trump was right in 2018 to insist that Canada’s and Mexico’s IP standards rise to meet America’s. Weak foreign protections rob U.S. inventors of fair compensation and undermine our national competitiveness. When we fail to defend IP—even in seemingly niche areas like drug regulation—we signal apathy and invite future intrusions on IP rights.
The Trump administration now has the opportunity to finish the job it started in the first term on IP protection under the USMCA. For the sake of American workers and innovators, it must not let this opportunity go to waste.
Ambassador Jeffrey Gerrish served as the deputy U.S. trade representative for Asia, Europe, the Middle East and industrial competitiveness from 2018 to 2020.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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