An independent federal watchdog concluded on Wednesday that the Trump administration violated the law last year when it refused to spend $78 million that Congress appropriated to support lifesaving healthcare research.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said that the US Department of Health and Human Services, headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., violated the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 by withholding grant funds as the administration worked to gut the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Researchers and advocacy organizations say the grant freeze has derailed key patient safety research.
In response to the GAO’s finding, the congressional Democrats who called for the investigation said that the report “confirms what we have known for over a year: Donald Trump is stealing taxpayers’ dollars that Congress set aside to improve Americans’ health.”
“The administration’s unilateral dismantling of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s grantmaking operations is an illegal impoundment of congressionally appropriated funds,” said Reps. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), Doris Matsui (D-Calif.), and Don Beyer (D-Va.). “Under Article I of the Constitution, the power of the purse rests strictly with Congress, not the executive branch. Trump’s administration cannot simply refuse to spend the resources we authorized for lifesaving healthcare research. Republicans must join Democrats in demanding that the Constitution is upheld.”
HHS is currently facing a lawsuit over its unlawful withholding of grant funds. The Society of General Internal Medicine and the North American Primary Care Research Group, the groups behind the suit, said the Trump administration’s assault on AHRQ has “eliminated” the agency’s “ability to process research grant applications, delayed decisions on pending applications, and withheld the use of funds that Congress specifically appropriated for healthcare research.”
“As a result, millions of dollars intended to support innovative studies on healthcare delivery have gone unused,” the groups said after filing the lawsuit late last year. "By halting these funds, HHS has abandoned support for the healthcare research that Congress expected and that the American public needs.”
AHRQ has not issued a single new research grant over the past 18 months, according to Josh Caplan, director of advocacy at the nonprofit AcademyHealth. Most of the agency’s staff has left or been pushed out by the Trump administration, which has waged a wholesale assault on the government workforce since taking power last year.
“Those reductions include the entirety of the staff overseeing [AHRQ’s] extramural grant program that reviews, issues awards, and manages federal investments, as well as nearly all staff supporting the US Preventive Services Task Force, dissemination and communication efforts, and intragovernmental experts,” Caplan wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Wednesday that the GAO’s decision confirms that “President Trump lit health research funding on fire last year, and it’s clear as day he’s just done the same again this year.”
“In fact, President Trump announced to the world just a few days ago that he was illegally cutting nearly $30 million more, and HHS has failed to detail to the committee exactly how it has spent down AHRQ funding for fiscal year 2026,” said Murray. “This is research that has saved tens of thousands of lives and saved billions of dollars in healthcare costs—but President Trump and Secretary Kennedy are intent on breaking the law to cut it off, and Republicans in Congress have all but let them do it.”
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