It was only when a hospital doctor refused to proceed that organ harvesting was abandoned.

Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revealed that the abuses went much, much further than just one man.

He announced that federal reviewers found serious problems in nearly 30% of the donor cases that they examined at the organ procurement organization.

“We found patients placed on the organ donation pathway who should have never been there,” he said.

“We found cases where the donation process continued despite signs that patients were not appropriate organ donors.”

He was speaking at a press conference that he said was designed to restore confidence in the transplant system. Then he announced that the Trump administration was decertifying Network for Hope, removing it from its role.

Just one problem: It’s a process, not an immediate ban.

“Seven million people across four states are at risk because this dangerous federal contractor is in every hospital in these 136 counties, and they’re still there today,” said Jennifer Erickson, a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists and a former assistant director in the Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Obama administration.

And then there’s the fraud. People waking up mid-procedure is just one of the allegations leveled at some of the 55 OPOs who run local monopolies to source organs for transplants.

The House Ways and Means Committee last year highlighted instances in which they were overbilling Medicare for costs that do not qualify for reimbursement, such as exorbitant executive compensation, lobbying, meals, and entertainment.

In a 2023 nationwide audit, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General examined 10 of them and found that 36 of 300 professional or public education expenses were fraudulently paid by Medicare. That was estimated to cost taxpayers at least $500,000 across the nation.

Then there is the use of private jets. An investigation into Indiana Donor Network, which operates a fleet of small jets purportedly to fly kidneys and other organs around the country, has had to answer questions about personal trips on the planes and whether the organization improperly billed the federal government for the flights.

The allegations get worse from there.

“America will be shocked when they find out what’s happening … just the way that we harvest organs and give organs to families,” Rep Aaron Bean (R-FL) said at the December hearing of the Ways and Means Committee that exposed some of the most shocking cases. “… I’m going to use a word you don’t hear very often: It’s evil. It’s evil to rob families of the hope, to mislead them, to take organs before any organs should be taken.”

He displayed a photograph from the OPO in New Jersey that showed boxes and boxes containing human organs, including pancreases, in a storage cupboard instead of being used for transplants.

Witness testimony described a loophole that meant when donor families were asked for permission to retrieve organs, pancreases could instead be used in research and still count toward OPO transplant metrics. Oftentimes, they weren’t even used in research.

Extraordinary testimony from a whistleblower in Kentucky described how, when one OPO’s freezers were too full of kidneys, staff would take the unwanted organs to a nearby hospital for incineration.

In the meantime, OPO executives can make millions a year while working for a nonprofit group that commands a monopoly.

Some of the allegations have floated around for years.

Yet it was not until 2025 that HHS moved to shut down an OPO for the first time. Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency in Miami did not even fight the decision after it was accused of unsafe practices, poor training, chronic underperformance, and understaffing.

In contrast, Network for Hope said it will appeal last week’s decision.

Barry Massa, the group’s chief executive, said thousands of people waiting for life-saving organs would be affected.

“Network for Hope strongly disagrees with Secretary Kennedy’s decision to decertify our organization and will appeal this decision,” he said.

Kennedy described Network for Hope as a “bad apple” when he made the announcement. Researchers and whistleblowers see a rotten system.

“It’s a system that works incredibly well for the executives that get these paychecks, and yet it’s incredibly dangerous for people like TJ who are in an ICU,” Erickson said. “It’s also phenomenally costly to the taxpayer.”

Data from the Organ Procurement Transplantation Network showed that since 2020, when OPOs started being under bipartisan congressional investigation, 12,000 human pancreases have been harvested under potentially fraudulent circumstances, and more than 45,000 kidneys have been thrown away.

“If you want to know what’s happening, follow the money,” said Molly McCarthy, a three-time recipient who has testified before Congress.

Diving further into these allegations seems like a no-brainer for an administration that has put waste, fraud, and abuse at the heart of its work.

HHS did not respond to questions about how many organs were destroyed each year or how long it would take for Network For Hope to be removed from its role.

Anthropic gambles on a Trump critic

Anthropic just named its first-ever chief global affairs officer, and his record suggests he will not have an easy time working with the Trump administration.

Tino Cuellar, appointed to lead Anthropic’s government relations, will have a full in-tray as the AI giant hurtles toward a massive IPO. He will have to navigate questions about the Trump administration’s plans to regulate the industry, cheap competition from China, and a growing backlash over data centers.

His recent history suggests top Trump officials may not warm to him.

He sat on the Harvard Corporation when it issued a statement of unanimous support for Claudine Gay, the former Harvard University president. It called her “the right leader” even as plagiarism accusations were mounting and criticism of her response to campus antisemitism was exploding nationally. She resigned three weeks later.

And then there is Cuellar’s published commentary on Donald Trump and his presidency.

“Never in history has the country faced such a massive, ‘Flood the zone’ strategy from a president who muses openly about a third term, implies that he can choose to impound funds previously appropriated by congress, and does not appear to care about the Constitution as it has been established by court doctrine and understood by generations of legal scholars,” he wrote in an essay for Foreign Affairs last year.

His social media feeds have chirped along approvingly at Supreme Court rulings against Trump, defending the Federal Reserve’s independence in the face of the president’s pressure, and criticized Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, who has made it a priority to investigate anti-Trump content.

Yet a spokesman for Anthropic, which has had its run-ins with the Trump administration, told Reuters that his appointment represents a choice for a consensus builder.

Let’s see how that goes.

Air Force Zero

Have you read the extraordinary Washington Post report that Trump was shuttled from Air Force One in a catering truck to a backup plane, becoming Air Force One as he boarded, for his flight out of Turkey last month? In light of that, we are sharing these details from one of the television poolers who thought they were flying on the same plane as the president, but were in fact flying on the decoy.

This is from ABC’s Michelle Stoddart, who was the TV pool producer on the flight.

Upon arrival to the airport, the events did not seem particularly out of the ordinary to the travel pool. The pool vans were far back in the motorcade, so we did not get a shot of the president boarding from the underwing position. Our photographer noted that the stairs were quickly pulled away as the press loaded. Press and White House staff loaded as usual. On board the old plane, there were bags of snack mix waiting for us with the presidential seal.

Once on board, the pool was instructed to keep our window shades closed. Our audio tech John Glennon notes that a Secret Service agent came back to the press cabin to remind us to keep our window shades closed. At one point, a photographer seated behind me opened their shade and was quickly instructed to close it again. We asked a wrangler why, and they only said it was a request from Secret Service.

Remember how, at the time, a pool report recorded how journalists were told not to open the window blinds? It all makes sense now, doesn’t it!

Plus, other photos show that the airport catering truck was hitched up to the president’s modified 747 when he boarded. Secrets has flown on Air Force One many, many times. Not once has a catering truck been anywhere near the plane.

Lunchtime reading

The campus pipeline behind Abdul el Sayed’s Michigan win: College campuses have become some of the most fertile organizing grounds for the country’s socialist insurgency, while the movement struggles in counties with higher concentrations of working-class voters whose interests they claim to represent.

The Democrats Can’t Just Laugh Off ‘Woke 1’: The excesses of “Woke 1” aren’t going away any time soon, despite what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) might want.

You are reading Washington Secrets, a guide to power and politics in D.C. and beyond. It is written by Rob Crilly, who you can reach at [email protected] with your comments, story tips, and suggestions. If a friend sent you this and you’d like to sign up, click here.