Disclosure: I have investments that may benefit from passage of this law.
The PASTEUR act would implement a government bounty for companies to develop new treatments for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Currently, hospitals and doctors tend to reserve the most cutting-edge treatments for cases where all alternatives have failed. On a local level, this is reasonable, because it mitigates the selective pressure to develop resistance to the newest treatments. But it also makes it commercially nonviable to develop new agents to combat these infections, because the best drugs will be used not as the standard of care (as they would be in outside of infectious disease) but as weapons of last resort.
The PASTEUR act would reward companies for successfully developing new drugs to combat infectious diseases, regardless of how often those drugs are used in practice.
The PASTEUR act has been (re)introduced several times: September 2020, June 2021, April 2023, and most recently in February 2026.
The 2026 "PASTEUR version 2" has been substantially updated, with a more rigorous definition of what counts as a "needed" antibiotic. It implements a subscription model, which gives annual cash payouts to companies that develop qualifying drugs, regardless of the number of patients who use them.
Previous versions of the bill were evaluated by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as costing around $11 billion over 10 years. We don't know yet what estimate the CBO will produce, but probably substantially less. This is the primary change the backers hope will move it through congress.
For several reasons - optics, PAYGO rules, and floor time -- it's likely to be crammed into an omnibus bill, if it ever passes. At the earliest, it would pass into law in late 2026.
I really don't know, it's not my field. I just happen to own a company that has a platform well-suited to producing treatments for drug-resistant bacterial infections. Currently, they're not using the platform to produce such treatments, instead targeting autoimmune. I learned about the PASTEUR act while researching the company, and thought that a disclaimer would be appropriate to include a disclaimer.