Congress approved the money. And then Trump's Department of Health and Human Services just didn't spend it.
On Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office — Congress's nonpartisan watchdog — ruled that this was illegal. HHS, run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., withheld more than $78 million that Congress gave the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality for the 2025 budget year. GAO found that this was an "impoundment" — refusing to spend money Congress ordered spent — and that HHS broke the Impoundment Control Act by doing it without ever asking Congress to cancel the funds.
The agency they starved
Most people have never heard of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. It's the only federal agency whose whole job is figuring out how to make health care in America work better and hurt fewer patients.
Its research helped hospitals cut central-line infections — the deadly bloodstream infections that can be prevented with checklists and basic safety steps like hand washing. Its grants have paid for work on cutting unnecessary antibiotic use, on whether telehealth helps people on Medicaid get care, and on treating low-back pain.
Senate Appropriations Vice Chair Patty Murray said the agency's research has "saved tens of thousands of lives."
Here is what's been done to it, according to Roll Call's reporting this spring:
- It went from about 300 employees to about 90. Everyone who processed grants was let go.
- No new research projects had been funded in almost a year.
- Not a dollar of the $345 million Congress gave it for the current year had been spent, and $80 million from 2025 was sent back to the Treasury.
- Review panels hadn't met in a year. Researchers told Roll Call that emails to the agency go unanswered. One attorney said they hear "every week from folks who have had to shut down their labs and let go of support staff."
Two professional groups of doctors and researchers, the Society of General Internal Medicine and the North American Primary Care Research Group, sued HHS over the frozen grants in August 2025.
Congress's power of the purse
This isn't a fight over whether health research is a good idea. Congress already settled that. It wrote the amount into law. Under the Constitution, Congress decides how federal money is spent, and the Impoundment Control Act says that if a president wants to cancel money Congress approved, he has to send Congress a request and let it vote.
HHS skipped that step. It just didn't spend the money.
And it's doing it again. Murray's committee office says the administration is using a "pocket rescission" — sending the cancellation request so late in the year that Congress can't act before the money expires — to wipe out nearly $30 million more of the agency's funding this year. HHS says the delays reflect a shift toward the president's and the secretary's priorities. HHS's budget request for fiscal 2027 asks Congress to cut a third of the agency's funding.
It's part of a larger pattern. We've tracked $177 billion in federal money promised to the states that the Trump administration has cut, frozen or slowed.
What it adds up to
The Government Accountability Office ruled that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Department of Health and Human Services broke the law by withholding more than $78 million Congress approved for health care research in 2025. The agency that money was meant for has gone from about 300 staff to about 90 and stopped funding new research, and the administration is moving to withhold nearly $30 million more this year.
Source
Trump Illegally Withheld Lifesaving Health Research Funds: Federal Watchdog — Common Dreams
