Press Release: 10/28/2026
Warren, Hirono, Gillibrand, Blumenthal Sound Alarm on Trump Administration Plan to Cut Nursing Home Inspections, Putting Over 114,000 Residents at Risk
Published October 27, 2026
“With the new policy in place, it is a virtual certainty that watered-down inspections will miss key deficiencies that put residents at risk.”
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) along with Senators Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Ranking Member of the Special Committee on Aging, and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) sent a letter to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Mehmet Oz, raising serious concerns regarding the agency’s newly implemented Risk-Based Survey (RBS) program. The administration’s policy puts an estimated 114,300 nursing home residents in nearly 1,700 facilities at risk by limiting the number and scope of required federal and state inspections. CMS recently released the full list of the nursing homes that will be subjected to shorter, less rigorous reviews and inspections.
Nursing home residents depend on comprehensive, thorough, and unannounced surveys to detect, correct, and prevent abuse, neglect, and substandard care. By allowing these minimal inspections, the new CMS approach weakens oversight and puts nursing home residents at greater risk of mistreatment, injury and abuse,” wrote the senators.
Warren’s letter highlighted a new analysis by Consumer Voice, which showed that the criteria CMS uses to identify lower-risk facilities eligible for reduced scrutiny do not reliably reflect high-quality care. For example, Consumer Voice found that dozens of homes on the reduced survey list have had a resident abuse tag or icon on the CMS Care Compare website since September 2025 and that about half of the newly RBS-eligible nursing homes would not have been eligible a year ago — indicating that, at best, they have a very limited record of providing high-quality services.
“CMS has adopted the RBS against a broader backdrop of rolled-back nursing home standards, including the elimination of new minimum staffing standards and delays to nursing home financial transparency requirements. These actions already place nursing home residents at risk — and the new policy of limited surveys will only make matters worse,” continued the senators.
Senator Warren requested that CMS release information on whether the RBS adequately protects nursing home residents and follows federal statutory requirements by November 9, 2026.
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Source: Original release