[Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)] has had two major functions: collecting survey data on U.S. health care expenditures, experiences, and outcomes; and funding research aimed at improving the safety and delivery of health care. It also has published tools and guidelines to enhance patient safety.
Its latest budget of $513 million amounts to about 0.04% of HHS spending.
“If you’re going to spend $5 trillion a year on health care, it would be nice to know what the best use of that money is,” said a senior AHRQ official who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job. “To gut a 300-member, $500 million agency for no other reason than to placate a need to see blood seems really shortsighted.”
Newly sworn-in FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, a surgeon who has advocated for patient safety, wrote or co-authored at least 10 research papers supported by AHRQ funding since 1998.
At their first meeting with the leadership of AHRQ last month, officials from Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency said that they didn’t know what the agency did — and that its budget would be cut by 80% to 90%, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting who were granted anonymity because of fears of retribution.
Survey data gathered by AHRQ provides much of what is known about hospitalizations for motor accidents, measles, methamphetamine, and thousands of other medical issues.
“Nobody does these things except AHRQ,” [patient advocate Helen Haskell] said. “They’re all we’ve got. And now the barn door’s closed.”
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted on the social platform X on April 1 that layoffs at HHS, aimed at reducing the department’s workforce by about 20,000 employees, were the result of alleged inefficacy. “What we’ve been doing isn’t working,” he said. “Despite spending $1.9 trillion in annual costs, Americans are getting sicker every year.”
But neither Kennedy nor President Donald Trump have explained why individual agencies such as AHRQ were targeted for cuts or indicated whether any of their work would continue.
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