At AcademyHealth, our focus is on protecting the nation’s capacity to generate and use evidence to improve health, regardless of which party is in power. Recent reports suggest that thousands of employees at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are being fired as part of a “reduction in force” (RIF) connected to the ongoing government shutdown. The reality is more complex and concerning than that headline implies.
Clearing Up Misinformation
The current RIF is not a result of the shutdown, but is instead part of the massive and likely unlawful layoffs that have hit the federal workforce throughout the current Trump administration. In fact, federal law actually limits the administration’s ability to take major personnel action during a funding lapse.
The Antideficiency Act prohibits the government from undertaking many actions during a lapse in appropriations, like we are experiencing now. This is why historically a funding lapse leads to furloughs for federal staff that are not directly working to protect life or property or other narrow exceptions from working. Federal law also requires that once the funding lapse ends, all federal workers will be reimbursed for missed pay. Furloughs, not permanent layoffs. The Antideficiency Act is so serious about limiting unfunded government actions that violations could include not just administrative punishment but also criminal charges.
How the Reductions Happened
Just before the shutdown began, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued guidance allowing human resources staff to continue processing previously planned RIFs. The guidance also allowed furloughed employees to check government email for RIF notices. These steps depart from long-standing precedent and create exceptions to the normal limits on executive action during a shutdown. It is unclear if these departures are legal.
These workforce cuts are part of an ongoing effort by the administration to reduce the size of federal agencies and were planned in advance of the shutdown. The administration is connecting them to the shutdown in part as leverage to force congressional Democrats to support the administration’s funding plan and in part due to the deep unpopularity of the RIFs and chaos they have created this year.
What’s at Stake for Health Research
Throughout this year, the administration has undertaken unlawful impoundments, or illegal withholding of congressionally mandated funding. The RIFs are a key tool in this, by eliminating the civil servants who manage grants, data collecting, and more, they are effectively withholding the funding Congress requires the Executive Branch to invest.
For the health research community, the implications are serious. Federal health agencies will lose the people who collect, analyze, and share the data that underpins the health system. Losing expertise in managing national datasets, evaluating health programs, and supporting evidence-based policy can slow research, delay studies, and weaken public health infrastructure.
Uncertainty in continued federal research funding is deeply corrosive for the ability of researchers, patients, and clinicians to undertake and invest in studies that save lives, improve outcomes, and increase efficiency.
The Impact on AHRQ
AcademyHealth has been actively monitoring and responding to the impact on the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the federal home for health services research, including:
- Exposing the operational collapse due to impoundments that threaten the agency’s grant function
- Working with Congress and the GAO to investigate these actions
- Supporting litigation to restore lawful grantmaking and protect scientific independence
- Raising concerns about AHRQ’s new strategic plan, which abandons core priorities
- Our CEO Aaron Carroll spoke on tradeoffs podcast about the impact of funding cuts on AHRQ and the field
Even before the current round of RIFs, these disruptions had dramatically weakened the federal health research workforce. Each additional reduction increases challenges for data collection, study completion, and the government’s ability to generate and apply evidence to improve health outcomes. These RIFs increase the chances of Americans getting sicker and dying earlier from preventable causes, as well as losing access to evidence-based, high-value care.
Protecting Evidence Benefits Everyone
AcademyHealth’s concern is about the impact on research, data, and public health infrastructure, not politics. Protecting federal health research capacity is essential for everyone because strong evidence benefits all Americans.
As an organization committed to advancing the use of evidence to improve health and health care, AcademyHealth urges policymakers and the public to recognize that federal health workers are essential partners in protecting the nation’s health. Reducing their ranks under the guise of efficiency or shutdown necessity weakens the capacity to respond to crises, improve care, and make policy based on facts.