Do No Harm’s legal push forced HHS to abandon a Biden-era payment rule tied to “anti-racism” plans, marking a significant court win and a broader rollback of race-focused healthcare mandates.
Do No Harm launched in 2022 to “safeguard healthcare from ideological threats” and now has over 50,000 members, including medical professionals and concerned citizens in every state and 14 countries. The group has focused on stopping policies it sees as politicizing clinical care and rewarding providers for following ideological checklists instead of treating patients individually. Their activist-turned-legal strategy pushed this niche fight into a national policy fight over Medicare rules.
The contested rule, implemented in 2021, tied higher federal payments for physicians to the creation and use of “anti-racism” plans. The Biden administration framed the plan as a way to address disparities, asking doctors to adopt targets, training, and measures to root out bias. Critics said the program encouraged the use of race as a clinical decision factor rather than focusing on individualized medical judgment.
Your doctor’s plan should include “target goals and milestones,” measures to “prevent and address racism,” “ongoing training on anti-racism,” and other measures to identify “explicit and implicit biases in patient care and addressing historic health inequities experienced by people of color.”
The CMS rule is representative of Biden’s government-wide agenda to racialize public policy. Following Biden’s Jan. 20, 2021, Executive Order 13985 for “Advancing Racial Equity,” the CMS rule holds, “This activity began with the premise that it is important to acknowledge systemic racism as a root cause for differences in health outcomes between socially-defined racial groups.”
No serious health policy analyst denies the stark reality of health disparities among different racial and ethnic groups, but it doesn’t logically follow that racism is the root cause of those disparities.
Do No Harm challenged the CMS approach in court, arguing the agency exceeded the authority Congress gave it under MACRA, the 2015 Medicare law that governs physician payment programs. The lawsuit zeroed in on the mechanics: payments should reward better care, not compliance with a federal ideology checklist. Over time the case moved into review and administrative reconsideration, drawing attention from officials across administrations.
Thanks to the work of Do No Harm, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has now reversed that rule.
Do No Harm achieved another significant legal victory after the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reversed a Biden-era regulation that offered higher federal payments for physicians who implement an “anti-racism” plan. Aimed at treating broad societal disparities regardless of their cause, the “anti-racism” rule encouraged doctors to use race as a primary factor in care over individualized medical treatment.
In 2022, Do No Harm challenged the rule, filing a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Chiquita Brooks-Lasure. Specifically, the lawsuit argued that CMS’s adoption of the “anti-racism” rule unlawfully exceeded the agency’s permissible authority under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA).Following the Trump administration’s reconsideration of its position in the case, CMS removed the challenged racial equity provisions in a new final rule published on November 5, 2025.
Townhall spoke with Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, Chairman of Do No Harm, about the outcome and what it means for patient care. Goldfarb described the case as the group’s first major lawsuit and a test of whether federal programs will steer medical decisions through ideological mandates. He emphasized that the healthcare field should center on clinical need and evidence, not bureaucratic racial categories.
“This is a big win for us,” Goldfarb said, noting this was the first major lawsuit filed by Do No Harm. Goldfarb said healthcare is a favorite target of such anti-racist policies, and noted that when the Biden administration implemented this rule, it was 2021 and the “peak of post-George Floyd” America. “They decided to go all-in on anti-racism,” Goldfarb noted.
Goldfarb also explained that Trump administration officials were willing to reconsider and roll back the policy once it was scrutinized. “They’re trying to get rid of this,” he said, praising the responsiveness he found among Trump HHS staffers. That cooperation helped move the administrative process faster than a long court fight alone might have done.
Four years after the rule’s rollout, Goldfarb said there was little evidence the policy improved outcomes and that any gains appeared to come from general practice improvements, not race-targeted measures. He argued that when hospitals improved care processes for all patients, everyone benefited, but that the rule’s emphasis on race risked dividing clinicians and patients.
Beyond outcomes, Goldfarb warned about the collateral damage of identity-based rules: “We have more racial difficulties because of these initiatives,” Goldfarb added, “and that’s the problem with identity politics.” He framed the rollback as a win for trust in the doctor-patient relationship and for medicine that treats people as individuals.
Editor’s Note: After more than 40 days of screwing Americans, a few Dems have finally caved. The Schumer Shutdown was never about principle—just inflicting pain for political points.
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