HHS’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has spent none of its $345 million budget for the current fiscal year, according to an April 7 Roll Call article.
AHRQ, created in 1999, is the only federal agency focused solely on studying how to improve healthcare delivery, the article said. It rewards and oversees grants that support research to scale safety practices nationwide, including work that has contributed to significantly lower infection rates and healthcare costs.
However, recent staffing and funding cuts have put the agency at a standstill. Here’s what to know from the article:
1. The agency had to return $80 million of its fiscal 2025 funding due to it not being used, and Congress gave it $345 million in fiscal year 2026, a 6.4% decrease from the previous year. HHS’s fiscal 2027 budget proposes to eliminate a third of the agency’s funding, stating that AHRQ’s research is “wasteful and duplicative of research conducted at NIH.”
2. AHRQ hasn’t funded any new research projects in almost a year, and existing projects haven’t received their allotted grant funding since before the end of the previous fiscal year in September.
3. The agency used to employ about 300 people, but now is run by about 90 employees. Many staff left due to layoffs last year, including all the employees who process grants.
4. Researchers told Roll Call they have been abandoned by the agency in the middle of their projects. They have been unable to reach staff, have been given incorrect information or told to withdraw their proposals and submit elsewhere. Yet researchers say they have not received termination notices or updates on when or whether they will receive funding.
5. The agency has canceled funding notices for several projects, including many related to antibiotic resistance and hospital-acquired infections.
6. The panel that usually meets several times a year to determine which applications to fund has not met in a year, the agency website says.
7. AHRQ Director Roger Klein, who was appointed last summer, has been accused of muzzling the agency by preventing public-facing communications, reports and presentations from being released, not issuing directives to staff about what work to fund and reportedly calling existing projects “worthless,” a former employee told Roll Call.
8. The Society of General Internal Medicine and North American Primary Care Research Group are suing HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. over the stoppage of research grants. The lawsuit was filed Aug. 21 and asserts that the “cessation of AHRQ’s grantmaking process violates the statutory and regulatory requirements governing the agency’s grantmaking process. It has resulted in an unlawful impoundment of millions of dollars that Congress expected and instructed AHRQ to spend on grantmaking and other research functions.” The administration argues that AHRQ is not required to issue grants or review every application it receives and that the appropriations are a “lump-sum that could be used for any purpose in furtherance of AHRQ’s mission,” Roll Call reported.
9. Plans to downsize the agency are casting uncertainty over the future of federal quality and safety efforts. The move is part of the Trump administration’s broader efforts to dramatically restructure HHS and lay off 10,000 full-time employees, saving $1.8 billion annually. Under the restructuring, AHRQ will merge with the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation to create the Office of Strategy.
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