On July 15, roughly 150 research teams across nearly 30 states received notices from the Department of Health and Human Services that their federal grants were canceled, effective immediately. The grants came from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the small federal agency whose entire mission is making American health care safer — research on preventing surgical infections, reducing medical errors, and getting effective care to rural communities. The cancellation notices cited the regulatory factors the agency is required to weigh, then addressed none of them. On August 12, thirty Democratic senators — among them Cory Booker of New Jersey, who opposed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation as health secretary from the start — sent Kennedy a letter demanding that the grants be reinstated and that the department explain how it chose what to kill. Congress appropriated $345 million for the agency this fiscal year. It has spent less than $15 million on grants and has not issued a new one in over a year.
What AHRQ Does
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is not a household name, which is part of why its dismantling has drawn little attention. It is the federal government’s dedicated agency for studying how health care is delivered — not whether a drug works, but whether the hospital administering it will give it to the right patient at the right dose without infecting them in the process. Its research portfolio reads like a list of the reasons people are afraid of hospitals: surgery-related infections, diagnostic errors, unsafe medication combinations, gaps in rural care. Among the canceled grants, according to the senators’ letter and reporting by Roll Call: training for rural health care workers in Connecticut, testing artificial intelligence tools in Wisconsin hospitals, improving autism screening for Black children in North Carolina, equipping primary care providers to treat chronic pain in Virginia, and research in Michigan on surgical infections, maternal and children’s health, and the long-term effects of COVID-19.
How the Cancellations Happened
The July 15 notices arrived without warning and took effect immediately, disrupting nearly 200 research programs. Federal regulations allow the agency to end a grant after considering a grantee’s progress, management practices, and the availability of funds — and the notices recited those factors without substantively addressing any of them, for any grantee. The thirty senators’ central demand is procedural as much as substantive: explain the criteria. How were nearly 200 projects selected for termination on a single day? The department has not said. The cancellations cap a longer hollowing-out: roughly 75 percent of the agency’s staff have been fired or quit since President Trump took office last year, and an agency Congress funded at $345 million has effectively stopped doing the thing it exists to do. The mid-July cancellations happened while Congress was consumed by the Blanche confirmation fight and the run-up to recess — which is to say, they happened quietly.
The Senators’ Demand
The August 12 letter, led by Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and signed by thirty Democrats including Booker, demands that Kennedy rescind the cancellations and produce the selection criteria. The constitutional point beneath the letter is one this Congress keeps confronting: the money was appropriated. Congress decided, through the process the Constitution prescribes, that this research was worth $345 million. An agency that takes the money and declines to spend it is not exercising discretion; it is overriding an act of Congress. That argument has been at the center of this administration’s funding fights all year, and courts have repeatedly sided with Congress. Whether these cancellations end up in court may depend on whether the department answers the letter.
Booker Saw This Coming
Booker’s signature on the letter carries a particular history. When Kennedy was nominated, Booker was arguably the Democrat with the most genuine common ground with him: Booker has spent years on food policy, and his critique of the American diet is blunt. “There’s no question that America’s food system is painfully broken,” he said during the nomination fight. “It drives historic levels of suffering and illness.” A senator looking for an excuse to back Kennedy had one available. Booker opposed the nomination anyway — his office’s statement was titled, without hedging, “Booker Opposes RFK, Jr., Nomination to be HHS Secretary” — on the grounds that agreement about the problem is not qualification to run the department. Eighteen months later, the department’s research arm has stopped issuing grants, shed three-quarters of its staff, and canceled nearly 200 projects without explanation. The senators most vindicated by an administration are usually the ones who were loudest; Booker’s case is the quieter kind, the senator who shared the nominee’s stated goals and concluded he should not have the job. His health portfolio this year has run in the opposite direction from the department’s: legislation to fund cancer prevention programs for firefighters, a bill to train community mental wellness workers, and continued food-system work. He is on the November ballot, heavily favored, and has spent August doing committee work and signing letters like this one.
Where Things Stand
The department has not publicly responded to the letter. The canceled research teams face the immediate arithmetic of grant terminations: staff layoffs, half-finished studies, data collection stopped mid-stream — the kind of damage that does not reverse even if funding is restored. Congress returns in September with the fiscal year ending September 30, which gives appropriators a near-term lever: the next funding bill can restate, with new specificity, what the $345 million is for. The People’s Podium will follow whether Kennedy’s department answers the thirty senators, and what Congress does if it doesn’t.