SID&T Submits Two Testimonies to the Committee on Ways and Means
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SID&T Submits Two Testimonies to the Committee on Ways and Means
Below are two different testimonies that SID&T submitted to the Committee on Ways and Means between November and December 2025 on the issue of recent changes to the the U.S. donation and transplant system.
December 15, 2025 Testimony
Dear Chairman Smith, Chairman Schweikert, and Members of the Oversight Subcommittee:
Science in Donation & Transplant (SID&T) respectfully submits this statement following the Committee’s December 2 hearing. SID&T was founded to advance evidence-based, science-guided reform in the U.S. donation and transplant system, one of the world’s strongest and most rapidly improving.
Lives are at stake. Meaningful reform to improve the donation and transplant system can only occur when legislators hear from experts and have all the evidence. Congressional hearings continue to miss the critical point, the decades long failure of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to adequately evaluate Organ Procurement and transplant will certainly lead to chaos in 2026. https://sidandt.org/news/latest-news/the-repetitive-history-of-cms-failing-patients-and-donors-with-flawed-performance-metrics-for-organ-procurement-organizations
Reform grounded in accurate data, validated science, and the expertise of those who work within this complex clinical system every day is both necessary and welcomed by the entire industry. However, the December 2 hearing did not include transplant surgeons, independent researchers, statisticians, or current OPO leaders. These are the experts who can provide peer-reviewed data to contextualize and correct many of the claims presented by hearing witnesses.
Congress to date has avoided hearing expert testimony from donation and transplant leaders, leading to destabilizing the best organ donation system in the world.
November 26, 2025 Testimony
Dear Chairman Smith, Chairman Schweikert, and Members of the Oversight Subcommittee:
Science in Donation & Transplant (SID&T) appreciates the Committee’s interest in safeguarding the integrity of the U.S. organ donation and transplant system. Our mission is to ensure that federal policy in this field is grounded in peer-reviewed evidence-based science, accurate data, and practices that protect patients, donor families, and the American public. We welcome oversight when it is guided by evidence, not by advocacy narratives or flawed assumptions.
We submit this letter respectfully, in advance of the December 2 Oversight Subcommittee hearing, to provide scientific context that is missing from the Committee’s background memorandum and to highlight several concerning misdiagnoses in the Committee’s framing. The issues you have flagged are serious. But the causes and remedies are very different from what the memo suggests.
I. The United States Has the World’s Leading Donation and Transplantation System
A foundational fact that is absent from the Committee’s memo is that the United States leads the world in both organ donation and transplantation. Any discussion of reform must begin with the scientific reality that the U.S. donation and transplant system is not failing, it is performing at world-leading levels.
