Members of the New England congressional delegation have made clear that New England Donor Services (NEDS) should continue serving as the region’s federally designated Organ Procurement Organization (OPO). In a July 27, 2026, letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, members of Congress from across the New England states urged federal officials to recognize NEDS’ high performance and long-standing role in saving lives through donation and transplant.
The delegation’s message comes at a consequential moment. CMS is undertaking an OPO certification process that could require NEDS to “compete” against OPOs from other parts of the country to retain its service area, even though NEDS is a high performing OPO and outside OPOs have no connection to New England, its local communities, nor to the region’s leading medical institutions. The delegation warned that replacing NEDS with an organization from outside the region would disrupt those connections and relationships, creating serious consequences for patients, donor families, and clinical teams. The letter states that, “[T]hese relationships that have made New England a pioneer across all types of donation and transplants, including innovations that are made possible by these close collaborations and cannot be simply or easily transferred to a new organization from outside the region.”
The lawmakers also raised concern that the CMS regulatory metrics driving the competitive process may not accurately reflect an OPO’s actual performance, “We are concerned that the statistical bias against large OPOs in CMS’s tiering method uncovered in peer-reviewed research [link] is particularly injurious to NEDS, the third largest OPO by donation volume in the nation.”
The delegation letter parallels a similar letter of support to CMS sent this year by all fourteen chiefs of transplant representing the clinical transplant leadership of every New England transplant center in New England. In that letter, the leaders of transplant across the region declared, “We respectfully ask that CMS consider the decades of successful collaboration, the measurable positive impact this partnership with NEDS has had on saving and improving lives, and that CMS continue New England Donor Services’ designation as the OPO for this service area.”
For NEDS, recent results tell a compelling story of high performance. NEDS coordinated organ donations from 641 deceased donors in 2025, resulting in 1,692 lifesaving transplants across its service area – the fifth consecutive year of organ transplant growth. Over the past decade, NEDS has increased organ donation by 127 percent and organs transplanted by 135 percent, progress made possible by generous donor families, dedicated hospital and transplant partners, and more than 400 NEDS team members working together to honor the gift of donation. This growth has continued through 2026.
Since its founding in 1968 as the first independent OPO in the nation, NEDS has built deep ties with its donor hospitals, transplant institutions, community groups, volunteers and donor families throughout New England. It is such ties that make donation possible and ensure transplant patients receive the best possible chance at life.
We thank the members of the delegation who weighed in on our organization’s high performance and clinical expertise to urge recertifying NEDS as New England’s OPO.