John Manchester
Director, IP Policy, Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC), U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Published
March 10, 2026
The big picture: Last week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report assessing the Biden Administration’s draft guidance on march-in rights—a policy that, if expanded, has been suggested as a way for the government to effectively seize IP rights for certain federally funded inventions, including breakthrough medical treatments, despite the absence of any statutory basis for using march-in to regulate prices. Thankfully, the GAO found little support for the claim that such IP confiscation would meaningfully reduce the price of life-saving medicines.
Why it matters: A growing number of anti-IP activists argue that march-in rights should be used as a government price control tool. The GAO’s analysis, however, reinforces that this approach is not only ineffective but could also undermine the innovation ecosystem that turns early-stage research into real-world medical breakthroughs.
What the GAO found:
- March-in rights were never designed for price regulation: Congress createdmarch-in to ensure that inventions arising from federal funding are developed and made available to the public—not to regulate prices. Using march-in rights as a pricing mechanism would contradict more than 40 years of legal interpretation and administrative practice.
- Narrow reach: Most medicines do not rely on patents subject to the Bayh-Dole Act. Studies cited in the GAO report estimate that even expansive, price-based march-in policy would affect only a very small number of medicines—as few as 2% over the last 40-plus years.
- Innovation risk: Universities, investors, and research institutions warned that redefining march-in rights could deter private investment, weaken technology transfer, and jeopardize the public-private partnerships essential for moving early-stage research into commercial products.
Zoom out: The Bayh-Dole Act was enacted to move federally funded discoveries from the laboratory to the marketplace by providing clear, reliable IP rights that spur private-sector investment. Repurposing march-in rights for price control purposes would introduce uncertainty into this proven system, undermining the very incentives that translate research into new therapies. As the Chamber has made clear, expanding march‑in rights could chill private‑sector investment in key emerging technologies— including risks to semiconductor manufacturing under the CHIPS Act and potential setbacks for U.S. leadership in quantum computing.
The bottom line: March-in rights are a targeted safeguard meant to ensure commercialization, not a tool for setting the price of prescription medications. Expanding them into a price-control mechanism is unlikely to reduce drug prices and could instead weaken the innovation ecosystem that delivers lifesaving new treatments for American patients.
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