Speaking in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Friday, the Iraq War veteran — now running for the U.S. Senate in Texas — said former President Joe Biden’s outgoing administration tried to push through a CMS regulation targeting skin allografts used by diabetic Medicare patients, and that Trump’s team put the policy on ice before bureaucrats quietly brought it back during the shutdown.
In a statement provided exclusively to Breitbart News on Friday, accompanying that interview, Hunt accused CMS of serving special interests instead of vulnerable patients.
“Once again, Washington bureaucrats at CMS have proven they serve special interests rather than the American people,” Hunt declared. “Late on a Friday evening before Halloween, CMS quietly dropped a rule slashing coverage for skin substitute allografts, lifesaving treatments that help diabetic patients avoid amputations and infections. This wasn’t transparency; it was a trick.”
The Texas Republican blasted the decision as a textbook example of the swamp siding with powerful industry players over ordinary Americans.
“This rule is a betrayal of patients, doctors, and common sense,” he charged. “It is a perfect example of the bureaucratic swamp doing the bidding of powerful industry groups instead of standing up for those who actually need care. They have overruled the public wishes of President Trump, Dr. Oz, and RFK on this issue.”
“Bureaucrats at CMS should rescind this rule and start listening to President Trump and the people they’re supposed to serve, not the lobbyists whispering in their ear,” Hunt insisted.
He further warned that the Halloween decision threatens jobs as well as patients.
“I’ll also say that this rule, implemented first by Biden, will lower the CMS reimbursement of allografts so low it’ll force the layoffs of thousands of Americans across the country, especially in Texas,” Hunt said.
Hunt then laid out the timeline in his interview, arguing that the policy is a legacy of Biden’s lame-duck term that Trump moved quickly to block.
“Keep in mind that during former President Biden’s lame-duck presidency — which was a disaster of an administration — he tried to push through a CMS rule that would actually harm countless Americans, specifically diabetic patients, for skin substitutes that they desperately need to increase and better their way of life,” Hunt explained.
“On October 31st, on Halloween night, during the government shutdown, mind you, bureaucrats that were actually part of an anti-Trump think tank are the people that implemented Joe Biden’s rule, despite the fact that President Trump put a stay on this rule for one year,” he continued. “So before that year was up, we had unelected bureaucrats undermine Dr. Oz and undermine President Trump to basically hurt and maim, at the end of the day, diabetes patients for the future.”
Hunt said recent briefings underscored just how critical the affected treatments are.
“Skin substitutes, and the implementation of skin substitutes for this particular group of people, is something that’s beyond necessary, and over the past few months, I’ve actually learned a lot about it,” he told Breitbart News. “We have companies that have been adversely impacted because it’s very expensive to produce these skin substitutes, but it’s also very necessary for these companies to exist, especially particular companies that are operating in good faith of the patient and operating in good faith with the president to make people’s lives easier.”
“So again, we have a case of unelected bureaucrats that are undermining our president, and we have got to make sure we put an end to it,” Hunt insisted.
Pressed on who benefits and who suffers under the Halloween rule, Hunt said the answer is straightforward.
“The patient loses. At the end of the day, the patient loses,” he said. “And you have to understand that 90 percent of skin substitute companies will cease to provide treatment to patients under this Biden-era policy. This is not President Trump’s policy. And also, what’s going to happen is that President Trump is going to get blamed for this, even though he didn’t implement the policy in the first place. So this is why we’ve got to put a stop to it before patients get upset with this administration when they had nothing to do with it.”
Hunt emphasized that Congress was cut out of the process entirely as the rule was finalized.
“This was done during the government shutdown — Halloween night during the government shutdown — so of course we had no say in this whatsoever,” he said.
The Texas lawmaker said his office is already working with colleagues to reverse the damage, even as he presses the administration to move first.
“Yes, my office and a few others, we’re going to try to fix this statutorily. But again, that takes a lot of time,” Hunt explained. “So we want to make sure that the White House is aware of this, the public is aware of this, before we move forward, so we can expedite this process.”
On the technical side, Hunt described what the Halloween rule actually does.
“It lowers the reimbursement for skin substitutes, and it makes it economically unfeasible for these companies to exist,” he said, noting that many of the companies at risk are based in Texas and employ his constituents. Asked if a significant share of the affected firms are in his district, he replied, “Absolutely.”
Conservative commentator Steve Gruber, host on Real America’s Voice, recently unpacked the fight at length, explaining how CMS used Halloween night — while Americans were distracted and Washington was consumed by a shutdown — to revive what he described as a long-dead medical regulation that could devastate access to care.
At issue are placenta-based skin allografts that cover chronic wounds and promote healing, particularly for diabetic patients. Gruber noted that their use expanded rapidly during the COVID era as regulators allowed broader use through telehealth exemptions in nursing homes and mobile wound clinics. Medicare spending on allografts, he said, rose from roughly $10 billion in 2024 to an expected $15 billion this year, prompting Biden-era regulators to respond not by targeting fraud and abuse, but with “draconian price caps” that threaten to bankrupt much of the industry and leave patients stranded.
According to Gruber, the finalized Halloween rule reimburses all skin substitutes based on the smallest possible graft size — a price point so low that only a handful of America’s roughly 50 skin substitute makers could survive financially. While that may temporarily push down headline costs, it would leave the marketplace dominated by the cheapest, least innovative products.
Gruber further reported that CMS carved out an arbitrarily defined subset of companies that had previously supplied clinical data for higher reimbursement starting in 2027, effectively offering what he called “state sponsorship to a small number of chosen medical providers and manufacturers.” Most other companies had reasonably relied on longstanding Food and Drug Administration guidance that did not require such trials, and now find themselves locked out unless they can somehow satisfy shifting, undefined data demands.
In an especially explosive part of his report, Gruber pointed to what he described as “pay-to-play” red flags: one favored company, he said, donated $5 million to a Trump-aligned Super PAC and another $2.5 million to a White House ballroom fund, even as senior CMS officials with deep past ties to major pharmaceutical and insurance interests pushed the new pricing scheme from inside the agency.
Gruber argued that Washington is attacking the wrong problem. The real driver of runaway costs, he said, is weak oversight and COVID-era billing practices that allowed providers to charge Medicare and Medicaid for skin substitutes with minimal safeguards, not reimbursement levels themselves. “If CMS truly wants to control costs,” he argued, it should focus on fraud and abuse rather than “punishing the patients and innovators who have made modern wound care possible.”
Real America’s Voice posted Gruber’s segment on X this month, captioning the video with a warning that CMS had revived Biden-era regulations on placenta-based skin substitutes, slashed reimbursements, and endangered wound care for millions of Medicare patients with chronic conditions like diabetes — all despite President Trump’s personal intervention to pause the rule.
Hunt publicly echoed that alarm at the time, responding on X that “unelected bureaucrats pushing anti-MAHA policy on a Halloween Friday night in the middle of a government shutdown is unacceptable,” referencing Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. “I will be looking into this,” he vowed.
President Trump himself weighed in in March with a Truth Social message addressing an estimated two million diabetic Medicare patients, criticizing a policy he said former President Biden rammed through after the 2024 election. Trump warned the rule would especially hurt veterans and minorities by cutting off access to limb-saving products, pointing to projections of hundreds of thousands of unnecessary amputations and nearly 200,000 avoidable deaths if coverage collapsed.
“Help is on the way!” Trump promised, making clear that under his watch, the Biden-era rule would be buried, not enforced — and that he would not allow a policy that “kills innovation” while driving more emergency room visits, amputations, and deaths.
In April, the MASS Coalition, representing stakeholders in the skin substitute industry, applauded the Trump administration’s decision to delay Medicare Local Coverage Determinations restricting access to skin substitute products until January 1, 2026. The group said the delay would give time to craft a fairer coverage and payment framework that protects Medicare beneficiaries, especially rural patients with diabetic foot ulcers and venous leg ulcers, without stifling innovation or punishing providers who follow the law.
CMS’s Halloween move, however, effectively overturned that pause and put the controversial reimbursement cuts into motion anyway, prompting Hunt’s investigation and renewed outcry from the industry.
Hunt has made government accountability and the protection of vulnerable patients central themes of his work in Congress. Earlier this month, he urged Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to expand an investigation into illegal aliens fraudulently receiving SNAP benefits, charging that American taxpayers are being “robbed in daylight.”
As he campaigns for the U.S. Senate, Hunt has cast the Halloween CMS rule as a key example of unelected officials overriding President Trump’s Make America Healthy Again agenda and endangering diabetics who depend on limb-saving care — urging both Congress and the administration to step in before more patients and workers are hit.
Joshua Klein is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jklein@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.
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