Today, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which has the authority to issue legal decisions on funding impoundments, formally found that in FY25, funds appropriated for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) were illegally impounded when mass layoffs dismantled the Agency’s grantmaking capabilities. This led to $80 million in federal funding for research left unspent, despite a clear, bipartisan intent to support research that makes American health care safer, more affordable, and higher quality.
The GAO announced that, “We find that HHS violated the [Impoundment Control Act of 1974] when the agency, without submitting a special message to Congress, withheld funds from obligation and expenditure following the RIF of AHRQ personnel responsible for grant administration. This withholding was an impoundment subject to the ICA and not a programmatic delay.”
By statute and Constitutional authorities, the Executive Branch must faithfully obligate funds appropriated by Congress. They do not have the legal authority to selectively fund programs or activities without congressional approval. The research that AHRQ funds solves the problems that Americans hate the most about healthcare – inability to access care, delays in seeing medical professionals, costs being too high, or biomedical innovations not reaching patients.
“GAO's conclusion is clear,” said Dr. Aaron Carroll, president and CEO of AcademyHealth. “The law was not followed, and health research that Congress paid for did not happen. That should concern anyone who cares about whether our health care system actually works.”
AcademyHealth, which leads the Friends of AHRQ, has been fiercely advocating for the restoration of Agency operations and the allocation of federal grants since this illegal impoundment began last year. For more than 18 months, AHRQ has not issued a single new research grant, and ongoing projects have also ground to a halt. An estimated 80 percent of AHRQ’s staff is no longer at the Agency due to actions taken by the Trump administration. Those reductions include the entirety of the staff overseeing the extramural grant program that reviews, issues awards, and manages federal investments, as well as nearly all staff supporting the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, dissemination and communication efforts, and intragovernmental experts. With the loss of personnel, it is impossible for AHRQ to fulfill its mission in making health care more accessible, higher value, and affordable. When promising ideas remain unfunded or are disrupted part of the way through, the effects ripple through the entire health care system.
These impoundments disrupted research investments and created uncertainty for the researchers, patients, providers, health systems, and policymakers that rely on this federal agency. And this disruption means lost care and wasted taxpayer investments.
AcademyHealth documented the impact of these cancellations on the workforce, preventive care, institutions, researchers, rural communities, the next generation of researchers, the patients who would have benefited from the research, and effectively blocked the agency from carrying out its core responsibilities authorized by Congress in improving patient safety and care delivery.
The failure to spend appropriate dollars continues. In July, AHRQ announced the cancelation of nearly every grant that it had previously awarded, from training grants for the next generation of researchers to studies that sought to tackle hospital acquired infections, barriers to cancer screening, improving patient capacity, helping children with asthma get care, helping providers recognize child abuse, and so much more. These cancelations and publicized ‘pocket rescission’ of funds in FY26 led to letters being sent from congressional leaders demanding that HHS reverse course and fully fund their extramural grant responsibilities. GAO has not ruled on FY26 yet, and AcademyHealth calls on them to do so.
“A finding like this matters only if it leads to action,” said Dr. Carroll. “We hope it strengthens the resolve of Congress, in both parties, to see that these funds are used as the law requires and that this is not allowed to happen again.”
Last week, the GAO separately ruled that the Office of Management and Budget attempting to rescind $28 million from AHRQ on September 25, 2026 was also an unlawful impoundment. You can learn more here.
You can join the voluntary and free Friends of AHRQ here and be a part of the campaign for better health outcomes and evidence-based care for all.