Trump Administration Suppressed USPSTF Recommendations

Leadership of the agency that oversees the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) suppressed the group’s recommendations, a former task force chair said.

The director of the Agency for Research Healthcare and Quality (AHRQ) blocked the group’s final recommendation on cervical cancer screening in fall 2025, former chair Michael Silverstein, MD, MPH, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, wrote in a commentary in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

That’s despite the task force having completed a draft recommendation, running it through a comment period, and incorporating hundreds of public comments into a final recommendation, Silverstein wrote.

Task force members were also prevented from voting on a recommendation for preventing cardiovascular disease through healthy lifestyle interventions because of cancelled meetings, he noted.

“Despite the efforts, the task force has been blocked from publishing even a single recommendation since July 2025,” he wrote. “This means that primary care providers across the country may be following cancer, heart disease, or other prevention guidelines that are based on outdated evidence, and Americans are possibly being denied insurance coverage for highly effective services.”

Silverstein noted that despite all of the meeting cancellations, the volunteer members of the task force continued to meet virtually on a regular weekly schedule to do its job.

“What began for me as a bid to save an important institution became a deeply personal experience witnessing principled leaders and dedicated volunteers work to prevent the corruption of science on behalf of the health of the American people,” he wrote.

Not long into the second Trump administration, it became clear that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “had a particular disdain for the task force,” Silverstein wrote. He noted that after it met in March 2025, Kennedy canceled regular task force meetings, including July and November of that year.

By February 2026, several former task force members said they feared Kennedy was planning to eliminate the task force entirely; instead, he canceled the next meeting — which had been set for March — promising the meeting would be rescheduled in the coming months.

In April, Kennedy appeared before a House committee and said that the task force had been “lackadaisical and negligent” for the last 20 years and that he would be “bringing new members on who have a clear mission.” In May, Kennedy fired the two task force vice chairs — John Wong, MD, of Tufts Medical Center in Boston, and Esa Davis, MD, MPH, of the University of Maryland in Baltimore — but said they could reapply for their jobs.

At that point, eight of the task force’s 16 seats were vacant, largely because five of the previous members’ terms had expired at the end of 2025 and no replacements had been appointed. In addition, the annual report that the USPSTF is required to release each year was not issued.

Earlier this month, Kennedy appointed eight new members to the task force, bringing it up to full strength. New experts added to the roster include cardiologists, a gastroenterologist, a radiologist, someone with expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), and a health insurance expert. Neither of the fired vice chairs — Davis or Wong — is currently a member.

In an emailed statement at the time, American Medical Association President Willie Underwood III, MD, MSc, MPH, noted the USPSTF has typically been composed of primary care doctors and preventive medicine experts, and this new slate represents a departure from that.

Silverstein concluded that “strong science needs strong defenders” — such as “principled leaders like John Wong and Esa Davis [and] the other dedicated members of the task force.”

“These courageous people cannot control the political pressures forced on them,” he wrote. “What they can — and did — control was the quality of the work they conducted during these dark months of censorship. They are a model for all future task force members, and we all need to thank them for their efforts to help us live longer and healthier lives.”