Grants halted at agency devoted to safety of U.S. healthcare
CBS News · LC · trust 64/100
Updated on: July 29, 2026 / 12:44 PM EDT / KFF Health News
The Trump administration has effectively shut down most of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's activities, closing the spigot on federal funding estimated to have saved thousands of lives and billions of dollars over the past 27 years by improving medical practice.
In a July 15 letter , the small Department of Health and Human Services agency known as AHRQ told researchers it was halting at least 104 grants, many aimed at improving patient safety. Although Congress appropriated $345 million for AHRQ for this fiscal year, the agency has spent less than $15 million on grants and hasn't issued a new one in over a year, according to a review of federal records. About 75% of agency staffers have been fired or quit since President Donald Trump took office last year, according to HHS.
Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have sought to slash the federal government's investment in biomedical research, terminating grants and forcing scientists out of agencies across the health department. The gutting of AHRQ strikes some of the administration's critics as particularly shortsighted, though, because of the agency's noncontroversial focus on patient safety and its overall alignment with Trump and Kennedy's "Make American Healthy Again" campaign against chronic illness .
"When you think about everything Americans hate about our health care system — that it costs too much, that you can't get in to see a physician, that the treatment isn't right, that the records contain wrong information — all that is what AHRQ studies," said Aaron Carroll, chief executive of AcademyHealth, a health services research group that supports AHRQ's work.
The Trump and Kennedy changes to AHRQ appear intended to be permanent. All of AHRQ's grant managers have been fired, so there would be no way for AHRQ to directly oversee future grants, said Brent Sandmeyer, a former AHRQ program officer. "You wonder about this administration's commitment to fighting fraud," he said.
HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said AHRQ intended to establish a new "framework" for grants. She did not reply to requests for further details.
Researchers who received the letter from AHRQ Director Roger Klein expressed bewilderment because much of their work has the same objectives that Klein highlighted as the agency's current priorities.
"AHRQ is the only federal agency that's focused on safety and quality," said Hardeep Singh, director of the Houston Methodist Safety, Quality and Well-Being Institute. His research, funded until recently by AHRQ, has aimed to reduce medical errors introduced by inadequate software design.
Klein stated that AHRQ's research interests include patient safety, preventing antibiotic resistance, countering overmedication of children, promotion of digital health tools, and research "focused on scientifically valid, measurable health outcomes and solution-oriented approaches in health disparities research."
KFF Health News examined about 20 of the canceled grants and found that nearly all had objectives that overlapped with the priorities Klein outlined.
"If there's an ideology, lay it out clearly. But there's no clarity whatsoever," said Goutham Rao, chairman of the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. AHRQ has funded Rao's work for 16 years and ended three of his department's current grants.
As an AHRQ-funded researcher since 2010, Rao has produced work that led to new approaches for common problems seen in doctors' offices, such as how to respond to weight loss in aged and frail patients. His work has helped reduce diagnostic tests in the elderly and improve hypertension screening of children.
"The priorities they lay out in that letter make me think they didn't even look at what we were doing," said Andrea Shields, a University of Connecticut OB-GYN whose AHRQ grant was also eliminated.
Shields developed and implemented training of nonspecialist doctors, nurses, and emergency medical technicians to deal with high-risk pregnancies. Women in rural areas are two to three times as likely to die during pregnancy as those elsewhere in the U.S.
AHRQ-funded research has been key to improving patient safety, structuring medical information technology, and introducing the concept of patient-centered care into the health system.
The agency is perhaps best known for its work on curbing hospital infections. Practices introduced because of AHRQ-funded studies prevented an estimated 20,500 deaths and saved $7.7 billion in healthcare costs from 2014 to 2017 alone, according to an analysis the agency conducted.
Teams at Harvard, Yale, and Rand in Santa Monica, California, developed a national standardized patient survey that HHS and healthcare systems use to refine healthcare practices with patient perspectives in mind, said Susan Edgman-Levitan, who has worked on that project since 1995 but recently lost her funding. She and her colleagues developed a definition of patient- and family-centered care that became a pillar of healthcare evaluation. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services bases some of its payments on hospital surveys her group designed.
AHRQ researchers working on five-year grants typically get letters confirming their award in the summer or fall each year. Last year, Edgman-Levitan said, they got no word and no money. They wrote a letter to Klein but heard "not a peep" in response. Then, around 5 p.m. on July 15, an emailed termination notice arrived. The $1 million annual grant was for developing hospital surveys regarding childbirth and behavioral health services.
"My salary is gone. The salaries of all my research assistants, survey scientists, all lost. It's terrible," she said. "But I'm near the end of my career. The salary piece is not as devastating as the loss of what I view as really critical work and support for improving childbirth care and…
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