AHRQ Halts Continuing Grant Funding, Cutting Over $100 Million in Health Research

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has halted continuing grant funding for dozens of ongoing projects, cutting off more than $102 million in committed research dollars, according to researchers and a health-services association. AcademyHealth, which represents health-services and health-policy researchers, said it has identified 73 grants whose remaining funding has been denied, totaling an estimated $102 million.

'Everything Americans hate about health care is what this research focuses on,' said the academy's president and CEO. 'You think health care costs too much? That’s AHRQ. You think it’s too hard to see a doctor? That’s AHRQ.' A health-care management professor at the University of Minnesota said he has been denied $3 million out of an expected $5 million five-year grant that was training scientist-practitioners to quickly introduce evidence-based practices into patient care and eliminate costly, ineffective treatments. 'I can’t see a way to continue it without this grant support,' he said, adding that he fears losing a generation of scholars positioned to change the trajectory of the health-care delivery system.

The cutbacks come after Republican House appropriators proposed eliminating AHRQ funding early last month and underscore ongoing disruptions to research funding by the Trump administration. A Health and Human Services Department spokesperson said in a statement that AHRQ determined certain non-competing continuation grants would not receive continuation awards under a statutory requirement that the agency director assess whether continued funding is in the best interest of the federal government. HHS did not provide a list of the affected grants or explain how the decisions were made, saying only that the agency is adjusting its discretionary health-services research portfolio.

Four grant-cutoff letters reviewed state that the program through which the grants were awarded and the funding contract 'have been canceled on this basis, resulting in the unavailability of funds.' Three of the letters also listed AHRQ’s current priorities, including patient safety, preventing antibiotic resistance, telehealth, overmedication of children, digital health tools, long COVID, artificial intelligence, nutrition, and solution-oriented approaches to health disparities research.

HHS characterized the actions as nonrenewals rather than terminations, but researchers rejected the distinction. 'When you’re midstream and you’re expecting the funding to come through and instead they don’t and tell you to stop, you could pick a different word than terminated, but it’s going to end,' the AcademyHealth president said. He also noted that cutting funding mid-study means millions already spent are wasted. 'If you’ve started a huge study and you’ve already spent, let’s say, $2 million of $5 million on it and you’ve enrolled patients, that’s now wasted.'