WASHINGTON — Susan Edgman-Levitan spent years designing the survey that hospitals use to learn how many of their patients develop preventable infections, receive the wrong medication, or leave with a condition they did not arrive with. In July, her salary disappeared. So did the salaries of her research assistants and survey scientists, all at once, when the federal grant that paid them ran out and no renewal came.
That grant came from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the only federal body whose sole purpose is to fund the science of making American healthcare safer. Congress appropriated $345 million for the agency in fiscal year 2026. The Trump administration has distributed less than $15 million of it in grants, according to federal records reviewed by CBS News.
The gap between what Congress funded and what the administration spent, a difference of more than $330 million, is the operating signature of what has happened to AHRQ since the start of the year. The agency has issued no new grants in over a year. All of its grant managers have been fired. Staff has been cut by roughly 75 percent, from about 300 employees to 74. Its director has not held a single agency-wide meeting since taking over. What Congress created and funded, the records show, the administration has quietly stopped running.
The consequences for patients are not abstract. Between 2014 and 2017, AHRQ-funded research on hospital-acquired infections prevented an estimated 20,500 deaths and saved $7.7 billion in healthcare costs, according to agency data. The survey tools Edgman-Levitan and her colleagues built now power the routine quality monitoring that hospitals run on patients in every state. Without the research pipeline that AHRQ provides, those tools stop improving. Without new grants, the next generation of findings on antibiotic resistance, pediatric overmedication, and maternal mortality in rural areas goes unfunded.
Hardeep Singh, director of the Houston Methodist Safety Institute, called AHRQ “the only federal agency that’s focused on safety and quality” in remarks to CBS News. That status is what makes its dismantling consequential in a way that a budget cut to a general program would not be. Aaron Carroll, chief executive of AcademyHealth, described the agency’s research portfolio as addressing every failure Americans identify in their healthcare system: costs too high, physicians unavailable, treatments that miss the mark, and medical records containing errors. “All that is what AHRQ studies,” Carroll told CBS News. He was describing research that is now frozen.
The dismantling has followed no public announcement and no legislation. AHRQ was not abolished by Congress. It was not reorganized into another agency. It was hollowed out through the firing of career grant managers and a freeze on new awards that has now run past twelve months. On July 15, termination letters went to researchers who had been expecting renewals. About $100 million in current-year commitments to grantees has been halted in the process, the CBS News investigation found.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent expert panel that AHRQ convenes to issue the evidence-based screening recommendations that determine what preventive care insurance must cover under the Affordable Care Act, has not met since March 2025. Its membership has been reduced from 16 to 6, below the quorum required to issue new recommendations. Screening guidelines for cancer detection, cardiovascular risk assessment, and developmental disorders in children cannot be updated as a result.
The administration has installed Roger Klein, a molecular pathologist and Federalist Society-affiliated attorney, as AHRQ director. Klein took the post in July 2025 and has since held no agency-wide meetings, according to current and former staff. This broader pattern of federal health agency staffing cuts and operational paralysis has drawn scrutiny across multiple departments. Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, told CBS News that “AHRQ is strengthening its grants process, reviewing agency work for quality.” No timeline for resuming grants was provided. Goutham Rao of Case Western Reserve University, whose research on pediatric overmedication has gone unfunded since the freeze began, offered this assessment: “If there’s an ideology, lay it out clearly. But there’s no clarity whatsoever.”
Brent Sandmeyer, a former AHRQ program officer, noted that the agency’s functions include identifying and reducing healthcare fraud, work the Trump administration has repeatedly said is among its priorities. “You wonder about this administration’s commitment to fighting fraud,” Sandmeyer told CBS News. The Society for General Internal Medicine has filed a lawsuit challenging the grant terminations. Nora Becker, a pediatrician at Michigan Medicine, offered a shorter verdict: “To be honest, it doesn’t feel like any of this is being done in good faith.”
The freezing of AHRQ grants is not an isolated action. Federal health research has faced sustained pressure since the start of the second Trump term, as the administration and congressional Republicans have moved simultaneously to reduce the scope of federal health agencies through staffing reductions, leadership changes, and grant freezes. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees AHRQ, has not publicly addressed the agency’s operational state.
What the administration intends to do with the roughly $330 million in appropriated funds not yet distributed is not publicly known. Whether it will be redirected, held in reserve, or eventually released to resume grants is a question the administration has not answered. What is known is that the researchers whose work prevented tens of thousands of deaths have already lost their funding, and the patients whose hospitalizations would be made safer by the next round of safety research are waiting for answers the administration has not given.
