Amid the Biden administration’s efforts to increase racial equity across government agencies, the America First Legal Foundation (AFL) has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to investigate what it suspects to be a forthcoming “racist overhaul” of the nation’s organ transplant system.
Filed on April 3, the conservative legal group’s request (pdf) seeks all of the department’s records relating to organ transplantation that include mentions of race, ethnicity, discrimination, and other such terms, charging that the Biden administration plans to make race a factor in prioritizing organ transplant recipients.
“On February 16, 2023, President Biden continued his radical, racist, and fundamentally anti-American overhaul of every federal function under the guise of ‘equity’ by signing a new ‘Executive Order on Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,’” the document notes.
The referenced executive order instructed federal agencies to establish “equity-focused” leadership teams to “prevent and remedy discrimination, including by protecting the public from algorithmic discrimination.”
One of the many agencies identified in the directive was HHS, which oversees the Health Resources and Service Administration (HRSA) Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN).
According to AFL, the order, combined with recent HHS efforts to “racialize” health policy, suggests that the Biden administration plans to “unlawfully alter” the OPTN to allocate organs based on the race of the recipient rather than medical need.
Racializing Health Policy
In December 2021, the HHS Centers For Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a request for information soliciting public comments on “potential changes to the requirements that transplant programs, organ procurement organizations, and end-stage renal disease facilities must meet” to participate in Medicare and Medicaid programs.
One issue CMS sought input on was how to increase equity in organ transplantation.
“Organ transplantation and donation in the United States remains highly inequitable amongst racial and ethnic minorities as compared to white Americans,” CMS asserted, noting that it was “actively working” to address such inequities.
