AcademyHealth welcomes Secretary Kennedy's stated commitment to resuming the work of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and to restoring its regular meeting schedule. These are things we have been calling for since the Task Force's July 2025 meeting was canceled without explanation, the first such cancellation in the panel's 40-year history.
Five Task Force member terms expired in December 2025 and have not been replaced as they should have been. Filling those seats is both necessary and overdue. Secretary Kennedy told the Committee that “[w]e are now bringing new members on who have a clear mission.” We assume that the Secretary must mean the existing USPSTF mission to make “evidence-based recommendations about preventive services such as screenings, behavioral counseling, and preventive medications.”
We look forward to the Secretary working with stakeholders in good faith in identifying credible and nonpartisan preventive and primary care experts who will engage with the latest data to inform best practices. As we have said, the Task Force’s credibility and value for improving health outcomes for hundreds of millions of Americans lies on the scientific independence, expertise, and rigorous lack of conflicts of interest of its members. This is why for 40 years, Administrations of both parties have upheld these high standards and why AcademyHealth has led the field in calling for a return to their functioning.
What would undermine the Task Force's value is a wholesale replacement of the current membership with individuals chosen for ideological alignment rather than scientific qualifications, as occurred with the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The value of the USPSTF lies in its rigorous, evidence-based process, not in any particular set of conclusions. Disrupting that process would not strengthen preventive care for Americans; it would undermine the trust that makes the Task Force's recommendations actionable in clinical practice.
AcademyHealth is also frustrated and disappointed to hear Secretary Kennedy’s response to Representative Don Beyer’s concern about the unlawful impoundments that have paralyzed the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Secretary Kennedy said: “Dr. Klein, who is running it, who is a Yale-educated physician, who is running AHRQ, still has hundreds of staff, and the agency is operating.” The question is not the credentials of the person at the top, but whether the agency has the grants management, contracting, and scientific staff to execute its statutory functions. It does not.
There are two false statements in his statement. First, it is widely reported that AHRQ does not have “hundreds of staff”, but rather over 85 percent of staff have been removed from the Agency, leaving well under 100 left. These removals have led to the complete and total collapse of the ability of the Agency to manage the extramural grantmaking program that Congress has required of it and that has saved countless lives across the country. That leads to the second false statement, which is that the Agency is operating in any meaningful sense of the word. That’s demonstrably false. Since September, the Agency has not released a single dollar of funding to hundreds of grants that it has already awarded, and has not issued a single new grant in over a year. These impoundments are so significant that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is formally investigating the illegal impoundments breaking the Agency.
Just this past week, we submitted testimony to the House Appropriations Committee laying out the damage that has been done to the Agency and the critical urgency for Congress to ensure that its laws are executed faithfully. You can read it here.
We remain committed to working with Congress and the Administration to ensure that both the USPSTF and AHRQ can fulfill their statutory missions, in service of the patients and clinicians who depend on their work.