Acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill once said: ‘There are plenty of healthy, spare kidneys walking around unused’?

In late August 2025, numerous news media organizations reported that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had selected Deputy Health and Human Services Secretary Jim O’Neill to serve as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Soon after, a claim spread online that O’Neill once said: “There are plenty of healthy, spare kidneys walking around unused.” 

The rumor circulated on X, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Bluesky and Threads. 

Interim CDC Director Jim O’Neill thinks we should be able to decide to sell our own organs if we want since there are “plenty of healthy spare kidneys walking around, unused”. Which is problematic enough, but just wait until *he* decides he should be able to sell your organs.

— Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD (@elizabethjacobs.bsky.social) August 29, 2025 at 7:48 AM

In short, O’Neill, who confirmed that he would serve as acting director of the CDC in an Aug. 29 X post, did make the above remark in a 2009 speech titled “Health Innovation at the Frontier,” in which he argued that people should be compensated for organ donation to incentivize the practice (from 8:33 onward). Thus, we have rated this quote as being correctly attributed to O’Neill. 

The acting CDC director, described by The Associated Press as having a libertarian streak, spoke about what he believed the benefits of a free-market health industry would be, particularly in a seasteading community. (O’Neill’s speech took place at The Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to promoting the concept of seasteading cities, or “startup communities that float on the ocean with any measure of political autonomy.”)

In other words, O’Neill was arguing that health care would benefit from an economic system without regulations and little to no government control. 

In O’Neill’s comments about organ donation, he compared a potential free-market organ transplantation model to the United States’ current system, in which paying for an organ is illegal. He called the current U.S. organ transplantation system “cartelized,” referencing an international politics theory that modern states act as an “economic cartel” in which states have a monopoly on governance at the expense of their citizens (see Page 7). 

The Seasteading Institute published O’Neill’s 24-minute speech on Vimeo. His comments about compensation for organ donation began at 8:33 and are transcribed below (emphasis ours): 

Next question — for me, the most potent and vivid: Should organ transplantation be encouraged or discouraged? In a free market, recipients of life-saving organ transplants — or their insurers, or other benefactors — would be allowed to compensate their donors, creating incentive for more people to save more lives. In a cartelized system, people continue to die far too early and needlessly. In America’s cartelized system, 11 people every day die while waiting for a kidney that could save their life — and there are plenty of healthy, spare kidneys walking around unused. 

Snopes has previously fact-checked other rumors about the CDC under Trump’s second administration, including the true claim that the agency’s immunization chief, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, resigned in a letter denouncing Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership after the White House ousted O’Neill’s predecessor at the CDC, Susan Monarez. 

Sources