Trump Administration Guts HHS’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

On April 1, 2025, the Trump administration gutted the Health and Human Services (HHS)’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, slashing its budget and firing half of the agency’s staff.

In March, AHRQ leaders met with representatives from the Trump administration’s' Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), who informed staff that the agency’s budget would be cut by 80% to 90%. On March 28, the Trump administration announced that AHRQ would merge with the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, which develops health-related policies and legislation.

AHRQ has a budget of $513 million, about .04% of HHS’s total spending, and has played a key role in reducing hospital-acquired infections and enhancing patient safety through research. Survey data collected by AHRQ is a major source of information about hospitalizations related to motor accidents, measles, methamphetamine, and numerous other health issues.

Critics warn that dismantling AHRQ could lead to worse healthcare outcomes in the U.S., especially given the high costs and persistent problems related to medical errors. Hardeep Singh, an AHRQ-funded researcher at Baylor College of Medicine, stated, “[w]e need safety research to protect our patients from harms in health care. No organization in the world does more for that than AHRQ.”

Update: On August 21, 2025, the Society of General Internal Medicine, a group of 3,200 academic practitioners and researchers in internal medicine, and the North American Primary Care Research Group, which has 1,000 members involved in primary care research in the U.S. and Canada, filed a lawsuit against HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other HHS leaders. The lawsuit alleges that Kennedy and other defendants have “destroyed the agency's capacity to process grant applications, withheld decisions on pending grant applications, and refused to spend appropriated funds on the high-priority healthcare research that Congress wanted the agency to support.”