The federal agency that researches how to fix American healthcare is being quietly dismantled.
The Trump administration has cut staff at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality by 75 percent, canceled its grants en masse, and is withholding tens of millions of dollars in funding Congress already appropriated. AHRQ has spent more than three decades studying patient safety, care quality, and how new medical technologies and practices actually perform once they leave the lab. Health policy experts Aaron Carroll and David Atkins wrote in the Annals of Internal Medicine that the agency's survival through a second Trump administration is now an open question. Lawmakers and researchers have called the cuts sabotage.
AHRQ's work is unglamorous but foundational - it is the evidence base hospitals and insurers lean on to figure out what actually improves outcomes. Carroll and Atkins note that healthcare disparities used to be treated as basic quality problems worth fixing across party lines. Now they read as partisan targets, and the agency that studies them is being starved to match.
An agency built to answer whether a treatment or policy actually works is being defunded by an administration that seems to have already decided it does not want the answer.