The federal task force that shapes recommendations for cancer screenings, heart disease prevention and other preventive services has not convened in almost a year — and it’s unclear whether the panel will convene again.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, created in 1984, is an independent panel of volunteer doctors, nurses and public health experts that reviews the latest scientific research and decides which preventive care should be covered at no cost to patients.

Under the Affordable Care Act, most private insurers must cover services that receive an A or B grade from the task force. More than 150 million people with private insurance — including 37 million children — are covered by this provision, according to a 2022 report from the Department of Health and Human Services. The law also extends to roughly 20 million adults enrolled in Medicaid and 61 million adults on Medicare.

The task force typically meets to vote three times a year — in March, July and November. It last convened in March 2025. The July meeting was canceled, and the November meeting was scrapped because of the government shutdown. No meeting has been announced for next month.

The panel is also operating with fewer members. Five members’ terms expired at the end of last year and they have not been publicly replaced, leaving the task force with 11 members instead of its usual 16.

Dr. Alex Krist, who served as the task force’s chair from 2020 to 2021, said several draft recommendations remain pending, including an update to cervical cancer screening and an update to screening and counseling for perinatal depression.

The task force still meets virtually most weeks, said Krist, who is no longer a part of the panel. But the panel typically only votes on recommendations during the three official meetings. The task force typically issues 20 to 25 recommendations each year, he said, but last year only published around five.

“They’re very much lifesaving recommendations,” Krist said. “For clinicians, the task force is kind of our North Star on what we should do and not do for prevention.”

The task force is convened by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which falls under the Department of Health and Human Services. The uncertainty surrounding the panel comes as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has reshaped other federal advisory groups.

Last June, Kennedy replaced all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines. The Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) has also seen a sharp reduction in its public meetings.

Kennedy has the authority to appoint and dismiss members of the Preventive Services Task Force as well. According to a Wall Street Journal report last July, he privately criticized the panel as too “woke.” Two people familiar with internal discussions told NBC News that same month that Kennedy had been considering removing all of its members. In a letter dated July 27, the American Medical Association urged Kennedy to keep the panel unchanged.

An HHS spokesperson did not respond to questions on whether changes to the task force are still under consideration or whether the task force will meet in March.

Dorit Reiss, a professor of law at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said the panel’s work has long been intended to be insulated from politics.

“Like ACIP, the USPSTF was created to provide non-biased, science-based expert advice on an issue that should be governed by science,” Reiss said. “Their main job is to offer guidance to doctors. Politicizing the panel destroys that function. Doctors will, rightly, be less inclined to follow the guidance of an intentionally biased panel.”

The panel faced political backlash several years ago, when conservative groups sued HHS over the panel’s “A” rating for the HIV prevention pill known as PrEP. The case threatened the ACA’s preventive care mandate, but the Supreme Court sided with the federal government, preserving the requirement that insurers cover services recommended by the panel.

In total, the task force has 54 recommendations that must be covered by insurance. They include mammograms every other year to screen for breast cancer starting at 40, anxiety screenings for children starting as young as 8, and statins for certain patients ages 40 to 75 with at least one heart disease risk factor to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke.

Dr. Robert Lawrence, the task force’s first chair when it started over four decades ago, said the panel also considers how health risks differ across populations, including LGBTQ people and Black women, who face higher rates of maternal mortality than white women. He said he worries that such work could be dismissed by Kennedy as “woke.”

“Because of RFK Jr.’s anti-science posturing with regard to the vaccine issue and with regard to a lot of other issues in HHS, I believe the same fate befalls the task force,” Lawrence said. He co-authored an opinion piece published Tuesday in the Annals of Internal Medicine that said dismantling the task force would be “an existential threat to clinical practice.”

Task force recommendations are typically reviewed every five years as new research emerges. Without regular meetings, Lawrence said, updates could be delayed.

The smaller panel could also further slow the task force’s ability to review evidence and issue new recommendations, he said.

“I kind of fear going back to the dark ages before there was evidence-based medicine,” he said.