
Addressing the Organ Donor Crisis
Summary
The organ-donation crisis is one of the most persistent, expensive, and yet solvable public-health challenges of our time. As of January 2020, nearly 115,000 Americans were waitlisted for an organ transplant. The vast majority have kidney failure, which, as one of the rare conditions qualifying patients for Medicare, imposes billions of dollars of costs on taxpayers. In 2016 alone, taxpayers spent an alarming $113 billion on kidney disease — more than the entire budgets of the National Institutes of Health ($39 billion), the Department of Homeland Security ($44 billion), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, $21.5 billion) combined. The clear solution is to shorten the organ waiting list. For every Medicare patient who receives a kidney transplant, taxpayers save $250,000 in avoided dialysis costs. This proposal presents a discrete set of actions for the federal government to take to quickly and decisively to address the organ-donation crisis.
Inconsistent data collection makes disaster resilience more challenging than it needs to be. By opening up and making this data consistent, the Biden-Harris Administration can change the way we prepare and mitigate disaster for the better.
The Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission called for input from diverse stakeholders and FAS, along with partners Conservation X Labs (CXL), COMPASS, and the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST), answered the call. Recruiting participants from academia, the private sector, national labs, and other nonprofits, the Wildland Fire Policy Accelerator produced 24 ideas […]
The U.S. is facing a shortage in both pilot-scale and manufacturing-scale biomanufacturing facilities that severely hinders product development and commercialization.
The space economy is enormous, but one of its biggest challenges is tiny: space debris.