Trump administration ends dozens of grants for studying patient care
Science Magazine
Trump administration ends dozens of grants for studying patient care
“Nonaward” notices discontinue grants from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality whose annual funds had been stalled
Richard Grant, a primary care physician with Kaiser Permanente, had been waiting since the fall of 2025 for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to release the latest funds for the multiyear grant it awarded him in 2024. A few days ago, when an email from the agency showed up, he thought the money was finally coming. Instead, AHRQ was notifying him of the grant’s cancellation. The email, he says, was “the final nail in the coffin.”
The agency’s justification was essentially that his research now didn’t align with its priorities, which the letter noted includes “solution-oriented approaches in health disparities research.” Yet Grant’s project focused on how to better coordinate care for people with multiple chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and high-blood pressure, who face social barriers to care—such as not being able to afford transportation or food.
Similar terminations of ongoing grants went out this week to dozens of other scientists funded by AHRQ, a small federal agency focused on studying the quality of U.S. health care. The projects’ topics ranged from better coordinating kidney transplantation to reducing delays in diagnosing blood clots.
As of Friday afternoon, more than 70 projects that had won an estimated $185 million in funding commitments had received these “nonaward” notices, according to AcademyHealth, a research advocacy group that has been tracking them. That’s roughly half of all the active grants AHRQ had listed this week.
“This does not make sense,” says AcademyHealth CEO Aaron Carroll. The funding for these grants has already been appropriated for this fiscal year, in a “budget that was passed by both houses of this Congress, signed by the current president of the United States,” he says. “If I were Congress, I’d be livid.” Although AHRQ has recently been a target of Republicans who see its work as wasteful, the Republican-controlled Congress had approved $345 million in funding for the agency for this fiscal year.
The grant terminations are the latest disruption in a year of turmoil at the agency. Since 2025, it has lost much of its staff and canceled all open grant competitions. In August 2025, physician groups filed a lawsuit to force the agency to disburse tens of millions of dollars in unspent 2025 funds.
Asked about the notices sent out this week, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversee AHRQ, said the grants “were not terminated” but “they were not awarded continued funding.”
Data scientist Scott Delaney of Grant Witness, a group formed to track the termination of grants by President Donald Trump’s administration, says these “non award” notices are “terminations in different clothes.” He suspects the notices are worded this way because the administration is looking for other legal strategies to effectively cancel grants. “They were really bad at terminating grants in a lawful way … last year,” he says.
The Trump administration has consistently acted to eliminate staff and programs, “effectively dismantling AHRQ,” says Elisabeth Uphoff Kato, who was deputy director of the agency’s Center for Evidence and Practice Improvement until she resigned earlier this year.
Most of the projects given notice this week had probably already been halted because grant funds hadn’t been disbursed, Delaney says. But with these official agency letters clarifying the grants’ status, he adds, researchers might now be able to file lawsuits seeking the money’s restoration.
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