On Wednesday, the Trump administration, via the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), announced that it is shuttering an organ procurement program that had a record of extracting organs from patients who still showed signs of life. 

"Under the Biden administration, HHS failed to hold organizations accountable when serious patient concerns emerged. Today we are restoring that accountability. We will not tolerate organizations that compromise patient safety or betray the trust of donors or their families," HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said on Wednesday.

Throughout his time in office, Trump has prioritized social issues related to life through amended abortion policies, medical programs like the Right to Try Act, and other legislative efforts to respect the sanctity of life from birth to death. The latest efforts by HHS demonstrate a continued effort to preserve life in individuals who are organ donors. 

Decertification

HHS now begins the decertification of Network for Hope, the federally designated organ procurement organization serving nearly 7 million people across Kentucky and parts of Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia, after multiple federal reviews documented persistent patient-safety failures.

Between 2021 and 2024, HHS’s Health Resources and Services Administration said it examined 351 cases in which organ donation was authorized but not completed and found abnormalities in 103 of them (29.3 percent), including 73 patients who showed signs of neurological incompatibility with organ donation.

More alarming, some potential donors may not have been deceased when the procurement process was initiated. At Kennedy's announcement, a young man was present who, according to Kennedy, was on the operating table with organ extraction orders, but the physicians attending to him said they perceived that he was still alive and stopped the removal surgery, a nightmarish scenario that feeds a long-held fear about organ donation. 

Network for Hope, which plans to appeal the decertification, claims that the action by HHS will negatively impact more than 3,000 people waiting for transplants in its service area.

Reigniting urban legends

For years, a stubborn urban legend claimed that listing yourself as an organ donor on a driver’s license meant emergency responders would not fully revive you—preferring to harvest organs instead. Medical experts long dismissed it as baseless: first responders and physicians are ethically and legally bound to save life first, and donation only begins after death is declared.

The Network for Hope issue may reignite those fears. While the failures documented in the case of Network for Hope occurred in hospital settings rather than at the roadside, the documented lapses in judgment and safeguards have given new currency to old anxieties about whether the system truly prioritizes the living patient.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ 

The organ donation organization has headquarters in Cincinnati and Louisville and serves Greater Cincinnati, as well as all of Kentucky and parts of Indiana and West Virginia. According to NPR, hospitals are seeking to reassure patients and the community following the federal government announcing it will begin decertifying Network for Hope. Tiffany Mattingly, chief engagement officer, and vice president of Clinical Strategies, told NPR that "Our local hospitals are hopeful that any issues identified by HHS can be resolved promptly, so that the Network for Hope can return to its full focus to their critical life-saving mission." She says area hospitals don't anticipate any impact on patient care, transplant services, or organ donation practices because of the Health and Human Services decision.

The move comes as more than 100,000 Americans remain on the national transplant waiting list (with roughly 13 people dying each day while waiting), even as the system performed a record 49,064 organ transplants in 2025 from 23,788 donors and more than 170 million people are registered as organ, eye, and tissue donors, according to UNOS, a nonprofit that aims to strengthen organ donation and transplantation systems.