Potential Priorities for Health-Centric Agencies under the Trump Administration

The Trump Administration continues implementing its priorities, with impacts that include health-focused agencies. As addressed last week, new administration actions range from a focus on childhood chronic diseases to reviews of outgoing communication and current contracts and operational processes primarily at HHS, though other health-focused agencies fall into these categories as well.

Emerging health-related themes from the Trump 2.0 Administration include increasing the reliance on AI technologies, reducing provider burdens, and conducting audits to improve operational processes, and are likely to persist at health-centric agencies.

This article examines the Health and Human Services and Veterans Affairs portions of the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise: Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, which was published in 2023. Dubbed Project 2025, the document outlines a 180-day roadmap for a conservative administration and has been met with strong emotions for some of its policy recommendations. Nonetheless, the document contains some recommendations that may shed light to forthcoming actions by the second Trump Administration, particularly given the new administration’s actions thus far.

Health and Human Services

• Reduce burdens of regulatory compliance, thus removing barriers to innovation in health care delivery and reducing interference for patients and providers. (HHS Secretary RFK Jr. rolled back the Richardson Waiver to streamline HHS rule-making processes, however, it eliminates the opportunity for public feedback on certain regulations)
• Support private sector development and manufacture of novel medical products, reducing the role of FDA in this. (However, HHS Secretary RFK Jr. suspended the contract for oral COVID-19 vaccines)
• Require HHS to prioritize electronic collection and dissemination of privacy-protected data sharing by partnering with a data management expert to develop this such a system and reduce the burden on clinicians.
• Address weaknesses in FDA’s Adverse Events Reporting System), including simplifying the data entry process for providers.
• Reduce waste, fraud, and abuse at CMS using artificial intelligence for detection.
• Codify price transparency regulations under Medicare. (The Trump Administration passed Executive Order 14221 along these lines)

Veterans Affairs

• Increase transparency to ensure all veterans are aware of Community Care eligibility.
• Conduct an independent audit to identify IT, management, financial, contracting and other deficiencies. (In line with the VA’s recent announcement to phase out non-mission-critical or duplicative contracts)
• Seek operational solutions to VA aging infrastructure by expanding Community Based Outpatient Clinics and piloting facility sharing partnerships with local health care systems.
• Leverage increased telehealth to reduce personnel costs and expand broadband services to remote and rural areas. (Likely to become a key focus given workforce reduction at the agency)
• Conduct a high-priority assessment of EHR transition delays and functionality issues. (As of now, the EHR deployment is paused until mid-2026 upon further review)
• Improve the VBA acquisition workforce with additional contractor support and additional outreach at leader engagement and industry conferences.
• Acquire a new Human Resources Information Technology system that is more user-friendly among other additional capabilities. (VA has made some modernization moves on this)

As the Trump Administration agenda continues to unfold, assessing early actions (such as executive orders, memos, agency leadership statements) and potential policy influencers (such as emerging legislation and Project 2025 agency-level recommendations) may help contractors begin to understand where future budget priorities may lie. After the agency RIFs and reorganization plans and contracting reviews are complete, where should contractors be watching for potential opportunities and challenges? (Note: this consideration of Project 2025 is purely exploratory and Deltek does not endorse or validate its recommendations as definitive or final. We are committed to basing our analysis on a comprehensive review of multiple, available resources and data.)

Be sure to stay informed on the impacts to federal contractors and opportunities from the new Trump Administration through Deltek’s GovWin’s First 100 Days Resource Center.