Restore Congressionally Appropriated Funding to Patient Safety Research

As your constituent, I urge you to investigate the apparent unlawful impoundment of congressionally appropriated funds at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and demand restoration of its grant program. Congress appropriated $345 million for AHRQ this fiscal year. The agency has spent less than $15 million on grants and has not issued a new one in over a year. In July, it abruptly terminated at least 150 active grants worth $94 million—research addressing patient safety, antibiotic resistance, pediatric overmedication, and measurable health outcomes. This matters to my family. Like many Americans who have used a hospital, we have benefited from AHRQ-funded research. The agency's work on central-line infection prevention alone has prevented 290–605 deaths and saved $7.7 billion in four years. Its patient-experience surveys shape Medicare reimbursement. Its quality indicators help regulators identify harmful hospitals. Its team-communication training is now standard in operating rooms and emergency departments. The cancelled grants include critical research on maternal mortality in rural areas (where women die at two to three times the national rate), pediatric radiation safety, lung cancer detection, and rural telehealth. These are not peripheral programs; they are the foundation of hospital safety. Equally troubling is the legal violation. Congress controls how public funds are spent as outlined in the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. A federal judge recently held that agencies cannot cancel awards over priorities adopted afterward. AHRQ appears to circumvent this by calling terminations merely "not awarding continued funding." I urge you to: Demand a full accounting of terminated grants and authorization Support restoration of AHRQ's grant-making and the $94 million in cancelled awards Investigate whether this constitutes unlawful impoundment Require AHRQ leadership to justify terminations against their stated mission The deaths prevented by this agency arrive silently, unrecognized. Congress must act now to restore the research infrastructure that keeps patients safe.