The Trump administration's rapid moves to reshape the federal government, a Department of Justice lawsuit against Medicare Advantage insurers, layoffs and Walgreens' take-private deal were top of mind for Fierce Healthcare readers in 2025.
The first months of President Donald Trump’s second term in office brought a clear paradigm shift across healthcare—both inside and outside of the federal government. Since his opening salvo of executive orders, Trump and his administration have been pushing to overhaul the funding and oversight of care delivery.
As the healthcare industry tried to keep up with the latest news out of Washington, D.C., it's no surprise that the Trump administration's sweeping actions to overhaul federal agencies through mass layoffs and executive orders garnered significant interest.
The ripple effects of the Change Healthcare cyberattack, the White House's health tech ecosystem initiative and the evolving state of the GLP-1 market also were popular topics among readers.
Here are the top 15 Fierce Healthcare stories of 2025, based on total page views over 12 months, ranked in ascending order with the most-read story at the end of the list.
In July, the White House and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a new health tech advancement initiative, securing voluntary commitments from 60 healthcare tech organizations, including Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Google and OpenAI. The 60 companies are expected to deliver results in the first quarter of 2026. The administration has two focus areas: a CMS interoperability framework and increasing the availability of personalized tools. The administration has a clear focus on consumers and support for individual access to electronic health records, as Staff Writer Emma Beavins reported.
14. UnitedHealth estimates 190M people impacted by Change Healthcare cyberattack
The Change Healthcare cyberattack in February 2024 disrupted the healthcare industry at a massive scale and had long-lasting ripple effects. The top of the year, in January, Change Healthcare, owned by UnitedHealth Group, confirmed that an estimated 190 million people were affected in the massive cyberattack that took down its services. In a previous estimate, filed with the OCR in October 2024, Change projected that 100 million people were affected by the breach. UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty told legislators last summer during a hearing on the cyberattack that a third of Americans likely were impacted.
13. Leaked HHS budget signals $40B in cuts, assumes ACA subsidies expire
In April, a leaked Office of Management and Budget document signaled the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS') reorganization plans. The leaked budget, a 64-page document, provided greater insight into how the reorganization, firings, reductions in force and office eliminations and consolidations will fundamentally alter the agency. The leak revealed that the overall budget for the HHS would decrease by approximately $40 billion to slightly over $80 billion. In September, the House Appropriations Committee advanced a spending bill providing roughly $108 billion for the HHS, a $7 billion cut from FY2025, aiming to reduce programs and safeguard taxpayer money.
12. RFK Jr. orders HHS to end 'extra-statutory' notice, public comment process in rulemaking
In March, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. closed the main avenue for members of the public to weigh in on pending health regulations and policy changes. The department issued a policy statement indicating that the HHS is no longer required to undergo a public comment period it typically observes following the publication of proposed rulemaking in “matters relating to agency management or personnel or to public property, loans, grants, benefits or contracts.” The change allows faster rulemaking, Trump officials said.
11. Fierce Healthcare Layoff Tracker
The healthcare industry saw a wave of workforce reductions throughout the year as healthcare organizations face mounting financial pressures while some companies downsized due to market shifts. By July, 51 hospitals and health systems announced layoffs affecting tens of thousands of employees, according to an analysis by WCH Service Bureau. From January through July 2025, major healthcare systems have eliminated approximately 15,000-20,000 positions. The layoffs span from small community hospitals cutting dozens of positions to major academic medical centers like NewYork-Presbyterian eliminating 1,000 employees.
In September, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved the next round of COVID-19 vaccines but only for a smaller, high-risk group. The administration is restricting their use for people ages 65 and older as well as adults and children over 6 months who have risk factors for developing severe COVID-19. With that change, pharmacies and providers are now navigating a regulatory patchwork with slightly different vaccine policies across 49 states and Washington, D.C. A month later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) landed on an official new COVID-19 vaccination policy, adopting the recent recommendations of its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
The CDC’s updated immunization schedule applies an individual-based decision-making process to COVID vaccines, meaning the agency recommends people consult with a doctor or other healthcare provider before deciding to receive the shot. Previously, COVID vaccination fell under a broader, universal CDC recommendation that covered all people ages 6 months and older.
9. Sycamore Partners closes acquisition of Walgreens, splits into 5 standalone companies
In August, private equity firm Sycamore Partners finalized its acquisition of retail pharmacy giant Walgreens and announced plans to split the company up into five separate businesses. Walgreens, The Boots Group, Shields Health Solutions, CareCentrix and VillageMD will now operate as separate standalone companies. The $10 billion deal was announced in March. Walgreens has struggled financially of late, battered by headwinds that have struck the retail pharmacy industry as well as challenges at its VillageMD unit.
8. VA terminates 585 'non-mission-critical or duplicative' contracts to redirect over $900M to vet care
As the Trump administration initiated an aggressive campaign to shrink the size of the federal government, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) made efforts to clean house. In March, the VA announced the termination of 585 contracts it said will help redirect more than $900 million to healthcare, benefits and services for veterans. The VA said its cuts are the “first step” in an audit of the roughly 90,000 contracts it currently has in place—a process its announcement stressed is being conducted with in-house expertise and feedback.
7. Founder of telehealth startup Done convicted in Adderall fraud scheme
Just last month, a San Francisco jury convicted the founder and a former top doctor at telehealth company Done Global of conspiring to distribute Adderall and other stimulants online. The jury found former CEO Ruthia He, and David Brody, the company's clinical president, guilty on two conspiracy counts—one count related to healthcare fraud—and four counts of distribution of controlled substances. It marked the first federal prosecution of alleged illegal drug distribution by a telehealth company, federal authorities said. Prosecutors are now leveraging those same charges against the company itself. A federal grand jury also recently indicted Done Global for its role in what prosecutors allege was a $100 million scheme to illegally distribute Adderall and other attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder medications over the internet.
6. How the shutdown impacts healthcare: Trump signs bill ending shutdown
The federal government entered a shutdown Oct. 1 after Congress' failed attempt to pass a stopgap funding bill. Immediately, virtual care flexibilities that arose from the emergency expired. Medicare telehealth flexibilities, including the ability for beneficiaries to complete visits from their homes rather than from a rural health center along with the novel hospital at home program, also ended. The HHS furloughed 32,460 employees, or 41%, according to the agency’s staffing contingency plan. The shutdown lasted 43 days, the longest in U.S. history, and ended when Trump officially signed the federal reconciliation package on Nov. 12. Readers showed up-to-date on all the implications through Fierce Healthcare's tracker.
5. FDA declares semaglutide shortage over, spelling end to compounded GLP-1 market, for now
This story was surprisingly popular with readers, signaling growing interest in the compounded GLP-1 market. The FDA in February announced that semaglutide, the active ingredient in weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, is no longer in short supply. The FDA's move was bad news for manufacturers of compounded semaglutide and the telehealth companies that have built up a market selling cheaper alternatives to branded weight loss drugs. The U.S. allows compounding pharmacies to manufacture close approximations of branded drugs when the reference drug is in shortage. Shares of Hims & Hers, an online health and wellness company that sells compounded GLP-1 medications, plummeted 25% the day of the FDA announcement.
4. Anatomy of a federal purge: How health agencies fired, and then backtracked, on personnel cuts
Former Fierce Healthcare Staff Writer Noah Tong kept close watch on the Trump administration's massive reorganization of the federal government, including layoffs and buyouts, which sparked legal challenges. After a judge determined probationary worker firings were illegal, the Office of Personnel Management retroactively modified a Jan. 20 memo to agencies in order to better comply with a court order. Amid mounting pressure, federal health agencies’ mass layoffs of probationary workers sparked controversy and a swift attempt to reverse course, Tong reported.
3. Justice Department hits Aetna, Humana, Elevance Health with Medicare Advantage kickback complaint
Earlier this year, the Trump administration filed a complaint against three major payers and three broker organizations, claiming the insurers paid kickbacks to brokers to boost Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollment. Insurers Aetna, Humana and Elevance Health are named, as are eHealth, GoHealth and SelectQuote. The Department of Justice said that between 2016 and 2021, those three brokers were paid "hundreds of millions" in kickbacks in exchange for enrolling people in the insurers' MA plans.
Trump had a busy first week in office to start his second term. There was a lot to unpack as Trump signed dozens of executive orders and outlined other presidential actions spanning large swaths of the federal government. This included an executive order revoking 78 executive actions taken by the Biden administration. Additional orders signed by Trump outline ideological changes to how executive agencies will craft regulations and view artificial intelligence or reassess the U.S.’ role in global agreements. Other changes weren’t explicitly laid out in the president’s orders but are reflected in materials no longer available on government websites.
And, the most-read story overall:
1. Federal judge grants second preliminary injunction against Trump admin's funding freeze
The Trump administration's efforts to shrink the government and freeze federal funding met immediate resistance from state lawmakers and healthcare groups. There have been many legal challenges to Trump's executive moves. Opponents of the White House effort to broadly freeze domestic federal funds scored another victory in March when a second federal judge granted a preliminary injunction against the administration. Judge John J. McConnell, Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, sided with a swath of blue states, writing in his order that "the Executive put itself above Congress" with late January's "temporary pause" of congressionally appropriated and obligated federal disbursements.