The Trump administration terminated dozens of health research grants this week, telling grantees it is shifting priorities to issues like the “overmedication of children” and autism, according to a prominent research organization.

The cuts hit projects at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, many of them multiyear awards that had already been indefinitely delayed.

At least 67 grants — a significant share of the agency’s portfolio — have been canceled as of Friday, according to AcademyHealth, a professional organization for health services researchers. The number is likely to increase, as new reports of cancellations come in, it said.

Many of the impacted grants supported junior researchers and innovative studies focused on patient care, and the funding delays have forced layoffs and the shutdown of programs already underway.

“Tens of millions of dollars have already been invested in these projects,” said Aaron E. Carroll, president and CEO of AcademyHealth. “People have been hired. Patients have been recruited. Lots of work is going on, and all of that is now wasted.”

AHRQ is a small agency under the Health and Human Services Department responsible for funding research into how health care delivery can be safer and better for patients.

It receives about $345 million a year from Congress — about 0.3 percent of HHS discretionary appropriations — but has been hobbled by the current administration. It hasn’t spent any of its funding in fiscal 2026 and is now terminating projects in the middle of their award periods.

[Related: ‘Nobody answers’: The unraveling of a patient care research agency]

Researchers say the terminations finally bring a measure of clarity after months of silence from AHRQ, but leave many midstream projects abruptly halted after going unfunded for nearly a year.

In notices to grantees viewed by CQ Roll Call, the agency wrote that projects were being terminated to “better prioritize agency resources.” It lists them as, “patient safety, preventing antibiotic resistance, telehealth, overmedication of children, use of digital health tools to improve health, long COVID, artificial intelligence, nutrition, furthering understanding of autism, promoting research focused on scientifically valid, measurable health outcomes, and solution-oriented approaches in health disparities research.”

However, several of the terminated grants appear to align with those areas, many of which have long been core priorities for the agency before the current administration. Funding was terminated, for example, for a randomized trial focused on antibiotic stewardship across 40 hospitals, according to AcademyHealth.

Eric T. Roberts, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had an AHRQ grant to study how to improve care for people dually enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid. Those “dual eligibles” account for roughly one-third of spending in the two programs, and policymakers have sought ways to improve care while lowering costs.

Roberts had not received funding for the project in a year and had only received support for two of the five years covered by the original award, which began in 2023.

He said a postdoctoral researcher working on the project had to be laid off and the program wound down just as it was preparing to study changes made by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

He received the termination notice this week but was not surprised.

“This has been a slow-moving disaster for the research community,” Roberts said.

An HHS spokesperson drew a distinction between terminating grants and not awarding “continuation” funding, saying this move represented the latter.

“Under statute, the AHRQ Director must determine whether continuation funding is in the best interest of the federal government,” the spokesperson said, adding that certain noncompeting continuation grants and jointly funded grants would not receive continuation awards.

‘Next generation’ at risk

The terminations raise concerns about what will happen to the pipeline for health services researchers in the U.S.

Health services research focuses on how care is delivered, accessed and paid for — studying ways to improve patient safety, outcomes and the efficiency of the health system. It’s viewed as an underfunded field compared to research into new drugs and therapies. Now, researchers say, training programs that support new researchers are at risk.

Dr. Stephen W. Patrick, chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at Emory University, received the termination letter this week for the department’s training program. It was a five-year grant, which hasn’t received funding since last summer.

The university is supporting current trainees but will not be able to accept new ones.

“These training grants are designed to train the next generation of researchers in this space,” Patrick said.

Another type of AHRQ grant supported infrastructure that train researchers, many of whom are practicing clinicians, to study ways to improve patient care and quickly put those findings into practice. The goal was to close a long-standing gap in health care: While researchers develop new ways to improve care, it can take years for those ideas to reach patients.

Those grants have also been terminated, including funding for the University of Minnesota’s Learning Health System Embedded Scientist Training Program. The program received a $5 million, five-year grant to train health system scientists but has not received funding for the past year. One product of the program was a tool that uses electronic health record data to more quickly identify clinical risk markers for the early detection of bipolar disorder.

“We’re losing a generation of very innovative scientists that really could address all the challenges we know to be replete in the health care delivery system,” said Tim Beebe, a professor of health care management at the University of Minnesota.