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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/08/sabotage-experts-lawmakers-blast-rfk-jr-for-destroying-healthcare-research/

The federal agency tasked with studying ways to improve America's outstandingly poor healthcare system is "on the brink," experts warn. The Trump administration has cut its staff by 75 percent, canceled its grants en masse, and is refusing to spend tens of millions of dollars appropriated by Congress.

Whether the agency "will survive the second Trump administration is an open question," health policy experts Aaron Carroll and David Atkins wrote in an opinion piece published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The agency in question is the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which has focused on ways to improve patient safety, healthcare quality, care delivery, and new technologies and practices since the 1990s. In the past, "Republican leaders recognized that health care disparities were fundamental quality problems," Carroll and Atkins wrote. But recently, disparities in care have become partisan issues.

During Trump's second term, DOGE cuts led to the firing or retirement of an estimated 75 percent of the AHRQ's staff. In July, AHRQ abruptly sent grant cancellation letters to around 150 researchers. More than 100 research grants collectively worth over $250 million have been canceled. Although Congress appropriated $345 million for the 2026 fiscal year, much of it has gone unspent, with only $15 million going to grants so far. As such, scientists across over 30 states have halted research, laid off staff, shut down programs, and stopped pursuing new lines of research.

In addition to the losses in data and research findings, Carroll and Atkins lament the loss to the scientific community. "This is what it looks like when we stop developing the next generation of health services researchers." Reversing the damage is doable, but will be difficult, they write, while calling on Congress to act.

Last week, 30 Democratic senators sent a fiery letter [PDF] to anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Noting the same series of events as Carroll and Atkins, they called Kennedy's handling of AHRQ "sabotage" and an "outrageous abuse of administrative power that will leave Americans sicker, poorer, and dying from preventable causes."

They highlighted just a few of the research programs that were axed under Kennedy, including studies on training rural healthcare workers to handle maternal medical emergencies in Connecticut, improving access to home dialysis in New York, reducing risks of patient falls in rural hospitals in Colorado, reducing overuse of antibiotics in Utah, improving autism screening and care for Black children in North Carolina, and improving chronic pain management to reduce reliance on opioids in Virginia. The senators also noted that grants were canceled out of the blue with form letters, which had contradictory explanations and incorrect citations.

With "profound concern and unequivocal opposition" to the mass grant cancellations, the senators wrote, "We demand that you immediately rescind these cancellations and ensure that the funding Congress appropriates to AHRQ is invested in health research in accordance with the law."

"We want to be clear: Democrats and Republicans did not work together to appropriate funds for AHRQ as a gentle suggestion for the [health] Department to follow at their discretion or leisure," they wrote. "We provided this money with the explicit instruction that the Department faithfully support life-saving research to improve access and health outcomes for Americans."

The health department under Kennedy has previously defended the cuts. The senators gave Kennedy until August 25 to respond to their letter.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

US solar and storage defy political hostility to dominate Q1 power installations:

Despite the many policy barriers created by the Trump administration over the past year, new figures reveal that solar and storage continue to dominate new power additions to the US grid.

According to the latest quarterly US solar market report published today by trade body the Solar Energy Industries Association and analysts Wood Mackenzie, solar and storage accounted for 91% of new power generation capacity installed in the first quarter of 2026.

Solar specifically saw 7.8GW of new capacity additions in the quarter, ensuring it retained its position as the leading source of new power added to the grid.

It performed particularly strongly in Republican areas, with states that voted for President Trump in the last election accounting for 74% of all new solar capacity installed in Q1. Texas, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Arizona, and Mississippi ranked among the top 10 states for new solar installations.

SEIA and Wood Mackenzie noted that, amid surging electricity demand and rising geopolitical instability, solar and storage offered energy security because they can be deployed quickly and operate without exposure to fuel price volatility.

Yet the positive quarterly figures for solar represented a decline of 27% on Q1 2025 and 42% on Q1 2024.

Furthermore, no additional solar module manufacturing capacity was added in Q1 2026 despite strong growth in recent years. Although several new cell and wafer facilities are in development, SEIA and Wood Mackenzie said the US solar manufacturing industry remains "gripped by uncertainty" relating to new foreign entity of concern (FEOC) requirements and ongoing trade cases that have stymied new development.

"In a world of fluctuating fuel prices, energy buyers have made it clear that they want the security, low cost and speed of solar and storage, which commanded a massive 91% of all new capacity built in Q1," said Darren Van't Hof, interim president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association. "Yet, as power demand skyrockets, political and regulatory attacks are slowing down the exact resources we rely on. Impeding the only sector that is actively building new power is a reckless gamble that will only drive electricity bills higher. The stakes are simply too high for Washington's permitting gridlock to continue."

Balancing the strength of underlying demand against the various political headwinds the sector faces, the report said its outlook for the US solar industry for 2026 to 2030 had changed only minimally, with a small 1.4% increase coming mostly from the utility-scale sector.

Although this will amount to a doubling of the US solar fleet over the next five years, the report noted that the last such doubling occurred in only three years.

"We are forecasting that US solar additions will be flat over the next five years despite the need for more power supply in the US," said Michelle Davis, head of solar at Wood Mackenzie. "We've seen a notable increase in solar procurements in utility resource planning, but current permitting bottlenecks continue to serve as near-term headwinds."