Biden-era regulation on the chopping block as Trump-aligned legal group warns of 'DEI lens'

By Fox News · Fox News

FIRST ON FOX: The Trump-aligned lawfare group founded by White House aide Stephen Miller is petitioning two of the government's top federal health agencies to immediately repeal a Biden-era regulation they claim promotes organ transplantation allocation based on race, not medical need. Initially, the proposed rule from the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) had an equity performance adjustment, but that part of the rule was scrapped before it was finalized. The Increasing Organ Transplant Access (IOTA) Model in question scores selected hospitals, which are required to participate, across three domains as it relates to kidney organ transplantation: achievement, efficiency, and quality. Based on the scores, hospitals will either get money for their efforts, owe money back to the federal government for not meeting expectations, or neither receive nor owe anything. Rather than an explicit score adjustment, the rule's equity agenda was embedded more subtly through a "voluntary" health equity plan that mandatory participating hospitals are encouraged to complete. The plan pushes hospitals to identify "health disparities" and identify "equity goals to monitor and evaluate progress in reducing targeted health disparities," which will be measured by "one or more quantitative metrics that the IOTA participant uses to measure the reductions in target health disparities arising from the health equity plan interventions." DOCTORS ON KEY US HEALTH TASK FORCE ACCUSED OF PRIORITIZING DEI OVER EVIDENCE-BASED MEDICINE "A federal rule cannot invite or normalize discrimination—not even under the guise of improving 'equity,'" stated an America First Legal (AFL) press release accompanying the group's petition. "Although CMS ultimately made Health Equity Plans ‘voluntary,’ the agency embedded them inside a mandatory federal model that encourages hospitals to integrate race and identity into transplant decision-making." The…