In 2001, the US Congress responded to the IOM recommendation to create a National Center for Patient Safety by allocating $50 million annually for patient safety research to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the lead federal agency for health care safety. The AHRQ organizes patient safety activities, provides grants to other organizations, serves as a clearinghouse for safety information, and publishes guidelines for evidence-based or "best practices". By 2006, the National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) contained more than 1,700 disease-specific diagnosis, management and treatment recommendations, developed from current medical literature. The goal of the NGC is to provide health professionals and institutions, health plans and health care purchasers an accessible mechanism for obtaining objective clinical practice guidelines. Adoption of guidelines has been slowed by physician and hospital concern that practice guidelines threaten physician autonomy and authority, fuel malpractice liability, and allow managed care insurers to curtail patient care expenditures.