Nearly a dozen whistleblowers have come forward with allegations that the New Jersey organization responsible for coordinating organ transplants has engaged in severe patient safety violations, including coerced organ harvesting and attempted removal of organs from a patient showing signs of life.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman David Schweikert released a detailed letter on Tuesday, obtained by the Washington Examiner, outlining several egregious medical ethics violations that whistleblowers say were committed by the New Jersey Organ and Tissue Sharing Network.
NJTO, serving the Newark, Camden, and Trenton areas, is one of 55 organ procurement organizations in the United States charged with coordinating the retrieval of donor organs for the more than 103,000 people on the national transplant waiting list each year.
Smith told reporters ahead of the letter’s publication that the allegations made by the whistleblowers were “some of the most disturbing we have seen in our ongoing investigations into organ procurement organizations.”
One of the allegations against the NJTO involves the cover-up of a case involving the donation of a patient’s organs after circulatory death, wherte the patient continues to show neurological signs of life.
Smith and Scheikert include in their letter to NJTO the circumstances of a patient declared deceased at Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, New Jersey, who “reanimated” shortly after being taken into surgery. The legislators wrote to NJTO President Carolyn Welsh that their investigation indicates that she, as well as other NJTO staff, attempted to pressure hospital staff to continue with the surgery, which hospital staff ultimately refused to do.
Whistleblowers also alleged, according to the congressmen, that NJTO pressured families into consenting to organ donation for deceased loved ones or insisted that they did not need consent based upon information collected from the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission.
The Ways and Means leadership wrote that whistleblowers made them aware of “several cases where, even though patients had removed the donor designation from their licenses, NJTO allegedly did not consider that to be a change of the original authorization to be an organ donor.”
“Families place extraordinary trust in this system at the most painful moments of their lives, and what we have uncovered puts the integrity of America’s organ procurement system at stake,” Smith said. “Every organization entrusted with this life-saving work must meet the highest standards, and any refusal to do so is unacceptable.”
Organ procurement organizations across the country have been under scrutiny from both Congress and the Department of Health and Human Services in recent months, following a series of reports of patient safety and medical ethics violations.
The Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency in Miami, Florida, was decertified in September, making it the first OPO to be decertified by HHS mid-donation cycle. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said during a press conference that Life Alliance had not complied with certain safety standards for more than 10 years and alluded to the group losing organs “because of paperwork errors or incompetence or inefficiencies in the system.”
Earlier this week, 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 Miami-area OPO that was decertified earlier this year following allegations of gross misconduct.
The Energy and Commerce Committee has been conducting oversight of various OPOs and the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network since 2024, after committee efforts uncovered reports of healthcare providers in Kentucky moving forward with the organ retrieval process without enough signs of death.
The Ways and Means Committee initiated a parallel investigation into OPOs in April to examine possible violations of Medicare reimbursement rules and the misallocation of resources.
Smith and Schweikert outline in their letter that NJTO has been evasive in providing requested documentation, saying that the organization’s alleged document destruction, data manipulation, and misleading statements may rise to the level of violating federal statutes related to congressional investigations.
The committee leaders requested transcribed interviews with over 30 NJTO executives and staff, as well as documents related to the allegations. They set the deadline of Dec. 3 to receive all relevant documents, as well as scheduling information for the transcribed interviews.
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A senior Ways and Means staffer familiar with the investigation told reporters that Smith intends to use a subpoena to compel testimony should NJTO not cooperate.
“Compliance is not optional,” Smith said. “The Ways and Means Committee will not hesitate to use every tool at our disposal to protect patients, taxpayers, and the families who rely on a system that must be built on trust, as well as the brave whistleblowers who have come forward from retaliation.”
