EXCLUSIVE — House Republicans are looking for more information as to why the Trump administration took the unprecedented step earlier this year of decertifying the south Florida organ procurement organization after alleged gross misconduct.
Republican leadership on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent an oversight letter to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz on Monday, asking for more information about the decision to decertify the Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency, which services the Miami area, following reports that the organization faced chronic understaffing, poor performance, and paperwork errors.
Life Alliance is one of the 55 nonprofit organ procurement organizations in the United States that coordinate the recovery of organs from deceased donors and assist in matching them to patients on the nation’s transplant waiting list. Life Alliance was the first OPO to be decertified in the middle of an organ donation cycle.
During the press conference announcing the decertification of Life Alliance, Oz referenced that the medical system should not “lose organs because of paperwork issues or incompetence or inefficiencies in the system” and said the CMS will enforce “appropriately rigorous standards” across all OPOs.
Oz also said Life Alliance had not complied with certain federal standards for roughly 10 years, including organs being sent to the wrong institutions due to labeling errors.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY) and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman John Joyce (R-PA) wrote to Oz requesting more information about the CMS’s decision to decertify Life Alliance and the agency’s ongoing oversight of other OPOs across the country.
“CMS has a unique perspective into the challenges facing OPOs across the country and areas potentially in need of reform to ensure that patient safety remains the highest priority in every step of the process,” Guthrie and Joyce wrote to Oz.
The Energy and Commerce Committee has been conducting oversight of the nation’s Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network since 2024, after several serious reports were uncovered of patients in Kentucky moving forward with the organ retrieval process without enough signs of death.
The Health Resources and Services Administration, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, issued a corrective action plan in May for the Kentucky OPO after examining 351 organ procurement cases, roughly 30% of which presented “concerning features” ranging from poor interactions with donor families to the recognition of high neurological function in the donor prior to surgery. The corrective action plan also indicated that similar, possibly dangerous patterns have been reported at other OPOs across the country.
Guthrie and Joyce referenced the HRSA corrective action plan in their letter to Oz, saying the allusion to other impropriety coupled with the decertification of the Life Alliance OPO “raises further questions about the prevalence of these incidents, as well as how CMS plans to respond.”
According to the HRSA, more than 103,000 people are on the national transplant waiting list, but about 28,000 organs from deceased donors go unmatched and therefore discarded every year.
Each day, roughly 13 people die waiting for an organ transplant. Guthrie shared publicly in July that his mother died while waiting for a liver transplant.
Guthrie and Joyce requested the number of patient safety complaints about unsafe practices that have been received by the CMS or the HRSA and information about how the two agencies collaborate on oversight.
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The letter also hinted at legislative options if “modifications to CMS’s authority regarding the certification or recertification of OPOs [could] improve the current system.”
Guthrie and Joyce requested a briefing from the CMS by Dec. 1.
