China reportedly plans to triple the organs harvested from its Uyghur community. So long as Communist authorities and Han Chinese imperialists want to eliminate the Uyghurs and other regional ethnic groups, they might as well profit from it.
The same pattern applies to adherents of Falun Gong, whose doctors sometimes remove organs while individuals are still alive, both because Communist authorities fear the spiritual movement and because adherents’ clean living makes their organs prized. In effect, contemporary China’s mercantilist approach to its prisoners’ bodies is even greater than the Nazis, who regularly sold the hair of Jewish women for industrial purposes or sold cadavers of political prisoners to university anatomy labs.
While there is little upon which MAGA isolationists, centrist internationalists, and the squad’s socialists agree, certainly countering forced organ harvesting and trafficking should be among them. Enter Reps. Chris Smith (R-NJ) and William Keating (D-Mass.), who, on February 21, 2025, introduced the “Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025.” The bill seeks “to combat international trafficking in persons for the purposes of the removal of organs” and “to hold accountable persons implicated, including members of the Chinese Communist Party, in forced organ harvesting and trafficking in persons for the removal of organs.” The House of Representatives passed the bill on May 7, 2025, by an overwhelming 406-1 margin. The sole dissenting vote was Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky), who perhaps misunderstands that there is nothing libertarian about allowing unrestrained governments to dissect their citizenry for the exercise of free faith and individual will.
Specifically, the bill would allow the Secretary of State to revoke passports of those involved in the trade and mandate that the State Department include assessments of forced organ harvesting or the trafficking of persons to have their organs harvested in its annual human rights reports. It would also deny visas and freeze the property of those involved in the trade.
Despite the bill’s commonsense approach and overwhelming support, the Senate has failed to take it up. Perhaps senators from both parties believe virtue signaling is enough to stop forced organ harvesting. However, autocracies like China and North Korea do not take finger-wagging seriously if not backed by action. Or perhaps senators believe that it is more important to issue proclamations “recognizing the 25th anniversary of the Mary Frances Early Lecture Series” or “commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act.” While Americans grow more cynical about a do-nothing Senate, senators bizarrely do not recognize that highlighting past achievements while doing little to address present problems merely reinforces the general public’s perceptions of Senate ineffectiveness.
A SENSIBLE LOOK AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT CUTS
The Senate has now passed the “Big, Beautiful Bill” for better or worse, and will return to work on August 4. As China conducts the greatest industrialized genocide since the Holocaust, it is shameful that the United States will not act meaningfully against one of its most grotesque aspects.
If the Senate cannot stand together on ending forced organ trafficking with moral clarity, then the institution, its priorities, and U.S. commitment to religious freedom may be far more broken than even Congress’s most cynical critics realize.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.