What’s lost: Trump whacks tiny agency that works to make the nation’s healthcare safer

Sue Sheridan’s baby boy, Cal, suffered brain damage from undetected jaundice in 1995. Helen Haskell’s 15-year-old son, Lewis, died after surgery in 2000 because weekend hospital staffers didn’t realize he was in shock. The episodes turned both women into advocates for patients and spurred research that made American healthcare safer.

On 1 April, the Trump administration slashed the organisation that supported that research—the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, or AHRQ—and fired roughly half of its remaining employees as part of a perplexing reorganisation of the federal Health and Human Services Department.

Haskell, of Columbia, South Carolina, has done research and helped write AHRQ-published surveys and guidebooks on patient engagement for hospitals. The dissolution of AHRQ is dislodging scores of experienced patient-safety experts, a brain drain that will be impossible to rectify, she said.

Survey data gathered by AHRQ provides much of what is known about hospitalisations for motor accidents, measles, methamphetamine, and thousands of other medical issues.

“Nobody does these things except AHRQ,” she said. “They’re all we’ve got. And now the barn door’s closed.”

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted on the social platform X on 1 April that layoffs at HHS, aimed at reducing the department’s workforce by about 20,000 employees, were the result of alleged inefficacy. “What we’ve been doing isn’t working,” he said. “Despite spending $1.9 trillion in annual costs, Americans are getting sicker every year.”

But neither Kennedy nor President Donald Trump has explained why individual agencies such as AHRQ were targeted for cuts or indicated whether any of their work would continue.

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Source: Fierce Healthcare, 3 April 2025