Group Says Canceled AHRQ Grants Top $131M Across 28 States

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has now canceled more than 100 grants, cutting off $131.3 million in remaining committed funding, according to AcademyHealth, which represents health-services and health-policy researchers. AHRQ funds efforts to improve America’s health-care system through research and training for new scientists and clinicians.

The Health and Human Services Department, which includes AHRQ, didn’t confirm or deny AcademyHealth’s figures Monday or tell Inside Higher Ed why it’s cutting off these awards.

When researchers began receiving cancellation notices earlier this month, HHS told Inside Higher Ed in an email, “AHRQ determined that certain non-competing continuation grants and jointly funded grants would not receive continuations [sic] awards.” Four grant cutoff letters seen by Inside Higher Ed referenced the “best interest of the federal government” but didn’t detail why the specific canceled grants weren’t in the government’s best interest.

AcademyHealth, which has been gathering information from researchers who say their grants have been axed, has launched a website that lists canceled grants across 28 states.

“When these cancellations started, there was no public accounting of what was being lost, so we built one,” Aaron Carroll, AcademyHealth’s president and chief executive officer, said in a message to Inside Higher Ed. “But a tally can’t fully capture the impact. This funding trained the next generation of researchers and studied how to make care safer and more affordable, much of it in the very areas AHRQ said it wanted to protect.”