Tracker Tallies Over $250M in Cancelled Grants From HHS Agency

A new online tracking tool from AcademyHealth shows the sprawling scope of recent grant cancellations by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). More than 100 grants worth over $250 million have been canceled, according to the tracker, and those numbers are only expected to climb, Aaron Carroll, MD, MS, president and CEO of AcademyHealth, told MedPage Today. AHRQ "just canceled a quarter of a billion dollars worth of grants, which are all focused on things Americans care about," Carroll said. Indeed, more than $118 million was already invested in important research, which was based in dozens of states, the tracker showed. More than $136 million in committed funding has been lost with the cancellations. "While we were keeping sort of a running tally for ourselves and talking to people about it, and just updating the numbers of what we were seeing each time, we realized that people would really benefit from just seeing online exactly what this is," Carroll said. "That we could update it as we get more information, but more importantly, it can tell a better story about what these projects actually cover, how varied across states they were ... what different foci they had, and how much they align with what this administration says are its priorities." Carroll said AcademyHealth is uniquely positioned to compile data showing the collective impact to AHRQ grants. "We had the contacts, we had the expertise, and so it's the kind of thing that an organization like AcademyHealth can pull together," he explained. "But it makes you wonder -- if we weren't, who would? And that's really the tragedy. There's no one really looking for all of this and pulling it all together so that you can actually tell the story that's necessary." HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from MedPage Today. Research affected by the canceled grants spans a wide variety of areas, including advancing diabetes care, tackling antibiotic resistance, and improving pediatric care, to name a few. "Patients have been recruited, clinics have been signed up, hospitals have been enrolled," Carroll said. "People have been hired to work on this, they've been collecting data, doing important work. It's all in progress, and basically, they're saying, we think it's so important to cancel this that we don't care that we're just going to blow and lose $118 million." "I don't understand it, and especially since this Congress, this House, and this Senate wrote a fiscal year 2026 budget, which appropriated all this money to AHRQ, and this president signed it," he added. It's not as though researchers can quickly transition to other potential sources of funding -- "maybe in a couple years, you could replace some of this," Carroll said. "What are your employees supposed to do until then?" The AHRQ grant cuts began earlier this month, when the agency started issuing what appeared to be batch termination notices to researchers. Termination letters shared with MedPage Today and posted online noted that AHRQ "is adjusting its discretionary health services research award portfolio in order to better prioritize agency resources." In many cases, funding had been stalled and researchers had been left in the dark about the status of their grants for a long period of time prior to receiving the notices. AcademyHealth has been keeping a close eye on other changes at AHRQ, including challenges at the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, such as a work slowdown and cancelled meetings. The group has also tracked other Trump administration changes, including the removal of federal public health webpages, which the nonprofit legally challenged.