The ATS recently joined over 140 organizations in a letter calling on Congress to increase funding for the Agency for Health Research and Quality. AHRQ is the lead federal agency within the Department of Health and Human Services charged with improving the safety and quality of the U.S. health care system and supporting health services research. For instance, AHRQ is the main agency focused on initiatives to reduce medical errors and prevent health care-associated infections. The letter, authored by the Friends of AHRQ, states, “AHRQ funds the research needed to change what’s wrong and share what’s right in day-to-day health care delivery.”

The Friends of AHRQ letter urges Congress to provide a funding increase of $454 million in FY2019 for the AHRQ, a $20 million increase over the current FY2018 level of $433.8 million. As it did in FY2017, President Trump’s FY2019 budget proposes to move the AHRQ to the NIH and create a new National Institute of Research on Safety and Quality with drastically reduced overall funding of $41.3 million, or just under 10 percent of AHRQ’s current budget. Congress rejected the proposed transfer of AHRQ to NIH, in part because the number of NIH institutes and centers is capped at 27, and thus, creating a new NIH institute would require elimination of another.