Agency Priority Goals (APGs) provide Departments a mechanism to focus leadership priorities, set outcomes, and measure results, bringing focus to key mission areas. APGs are set every two years and represent the priority performance goals of each Department.
Goals
HHS’s FY 2026 – FY 2027 Agency Priority Goals (APGs) are: embracing AI to combat childhood cancer, promoting program integrity, modernizing procurement, and advancing nutrition.
Goal Leader
Jeneen Iwugo, Acting Deputy Administrator and the Director of the Center for Program Integrity (CPI), CMS
Deputy Goal Leader
Wendy Horman, Director of the Office of Child Care (OCC), ACF
Goal statement
By October 2027, HHS will strengthen program integrity in human services, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Marketplace through enhanced fraud detection, prevention, and enforcement activities.
- Recovery of Funds - Increase Medicare savings through fraud, waste, and abuse detection and recovery efforts by 10% by the end of 2026 and a similar percentage in 2027.
- Improper A/B Activity - By October 2027, CMS will issue proposals in rulemaking to establish new criteria and processes to suspend or terminate CMS’s relationship with agents and brokers who violate CMS Agreements or regulations and ramp up enforcement against noncompliant agents and brokers.
- Stakeholder Outreach - By year end 2026, 75% of CMS stakeholder engagements will include messaging on crushing fraud, waste, & abuse, with a similar percentage in 2027.
- Human Services - By September 2027, reduce improper payments in ACF Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) from 4.93% to 4.67% by:
- Providing 10 targeted training sessions over the course of FY 2026 and FY 2027 for lead agencies around program integrity and error rates.
- Developing and implementing a new interactive training module on federal/state joint case reviews (JCRs) for improper payment case review staff.
Goal Action Plan & Progress Updates
Goal Leader
Jennifer Johnson, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Acquisitions and Senior Procurement
Deputy Goal Leader
Anthony Kram, Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary for Acquisitions
Goal statement
HHS will strengthen Department-wide acquisition functions to deliver consistent, high-quality, and cost-effective procurement shared services. Through coordinated buying of common goods and services, modern and consolidated acquisition management systems, and cross collaboration with the Divisions, HHS will realign core acquisition approaches to increase transparency, create Department-wide buying leverage, and efficiently deliver the best value to the taxpayer. By October 2027, HHS will:
- Onboard 100% of HHS Divisions to the Office of Mission Acquisition Solutions (OMAS) shared services organization for common information technology and professional services procurements, ensuring standardized processes, tools, and performance metrics across the Department.
- Transition at least 75% of targeted procurement actions from HHS Divisions to OMAS-supported operations.
- Establish and operationalize at least 2 OMAS enterprise-wide contracting vehicles for common acquisition needs, enabling consolidation of demand and improved pricing while maintaining program flexibility.
- Consolidate and modernize HHS acquisition management systems by transitioning at least 3 disparate, division-specific tools to a centralized, interoperable acquisition lifecycle platform that supports at least 75% of HHS procurement actions end-to-end, improves data quality and transparency, and reduces duplicative system costs and operational risk.
Goal Action Plan & Progress Updates
Goal Leader
Admiral Brian Christine, Assistant Secretary for Health
Deputy Goal Leader
Dr. Dorothy Fink, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health
Goal statement
By October 2027, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health will advance nutrition education and research to
support HHS’s efforts to reverse and prevent chronic disease in four main areas:
- Federal Programs and Policies
- Launch the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs)
- Develop resources to implement the DGAs
- Expand Food is Medicine/Food is Health initiative
- Clearly define ultra-processed foods (UPFs) at the federal level
- Advance GRAS policy reforms and food dye policies
- Engage the public with educational events
- Define healthy foods for purposes of supplemental benefits in Medicare
- Commissioned Corps
- USPHS Nutrition initiative: Develop and deploy nutrition education requirements for officers and achieve 99% uptake
- Establish Corps officers as trusted messengers in communities to deliver hands-on nutrition education and cooking guidance
- Medical Education
- Secure voluntary nutrition education commitments from at least 50 medical schools, with a 40-hour
competency equivalent established as the standard
- Secure voluntary nutrition education commitments from at least 50 medical schools, with a 40-hour
- Data and Research
- Add new nutrition-related questions to the National Survey of Children s Health
- Support research advancing our understanding of the gut microbiome s role in metabolic health and chronic disease
- Public Health Report Supplement regarding DGAs
Goal Action Plan & Progress Updates
Goal Leader
Warren A. Kibbe, Ph.D., Deputy Director for Data Science and Strategy, Office of the Director, The National Cancer
Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Deputy Goal Leader
Joseph D. Rogers, M.S., Lead Health Scientist (Informatics), Division of Cancer Prevention and Control (DCPC), Cancer Surveillance Branch (CSB), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Goal statement
Embracing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to combat Childhood Cancer: NCI and CDC aim to advance research on pediatric cancers by ensuring that data in the Childhood Cancer Data Initiative (CCDI) and National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR) data modernization priorities are AI-ready through enhanced integration and interoperability, enabling investigators to leverage AI with these data for advanced and innovative visualization and analysis.
- Improve data integration by increasing the number of cancer cases shared and the number of organizations sharing. Aiming for 30,000 number of cancer cases shared and at least 6 organizations participating by October 2027.
- Improve data interoperability of genomic data and incorporate additional data (diagnosis, germline predisposition, treatment, Adverse Events (AEs), clinical outcomes) as available. By October 2027 there will be genomic data from 8,500 children, with at least 1,200 new cases added per year, and 3,000 whole slide pathology images from tumors of pediatric cancer patients. These data are important for training AI models and discovering new opportunities to improve diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and long-term outcomes for children with cancer.
- Connect 2 additional data discovery and analysis tools to the CCDI Data Hub by October 2027.
- Support or perform 4 integrated AI data analysis projects by October 2027 and ensure the data and results generated are deposited into the CCDI Ecosystem.
- In collaboration with CDC, improve the quality and scalability of extracting clinical data for integration into the CCDI Ecosystem, incorporating new childhood cancer-relevant data domains, like the College of American Pathologists (CAP) Checklist and United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI)+Cancer by October 2027.