A bill aimed at curbing the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) forced organ harvesting of cultural and religious minorities, including Christians, has “languished” in committee for seven months as Senate leaders have failed to act.

Republican New Jersey Rep. Christopher Smith, sponsor of the legislation that passed the House with a nearly unanimous vote, told the Daily Caller about the growing threat to Christians in China and the real consequences of delaying Senate action.

H.R. 1503, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025, is not Smith’s first attempt to confront the practice. A 2023 version of the bill passed the House 413-2 before dying in the same place the current bill now sits: the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Smith chaired his first hearing on forced organ harvesting in 1998, hearing testimony from Chinese security officials. While the practice was once limited in scope, it exploded into a billion-dollar state enterprise following the CCP’s 1999 crackdown on Falun Gong.

Falun Gong, a spiritual practice drawing on Buddhist and Taoist traditions and once widely embraced in China, was the primary early target.

Because practitioners abstain from tobacco and alcohol, they were considered ideal harvesting candidates, with the average age of those executed and immediately harvested being 28, Smith said.

“I want to know how long [the patients] have to wait [for a liver transplant].”

David Matas and David Kilgour recorded from an undercover conversation they had with a Chinese doctor, as recorded in “Bloody Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong for Their Organs.”

“The supply of organs we have, we have every day. We do them every day,” the doctor responded.

“We want fresh, alive ones,” Matas and Kilgour asked.

“They are all alive, all alive,” the doctor reassured.

“I heard some come from those who practise Falun Gong, those who are very healthy,” Matas and Kilgour said.

“Yes, we have. I can’t talk clearly to you over the phone,” the doctor said, before inviting whom he believed was a potential buyer to visit in person.

The exchange can be heard here.

Smith, who has held nine hearings on the issue, said detainees’ health was closely monitored to prepare them for execution and the harvesting of up to six vital organs.

A 2024 report from Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) cited several independent sources verifying that Falun Gong often reported that prisoners of conscience were subject to unsolicited, coerced medical exams and blood testing, adding that guards would use organ transplantation to threaten prisoners who would not comply.

Although reliable data is difficult to obtain, DAFOH also found that Chinese organ transplant numbers were reported irregularly, as sudden increases were followed by decade-long standstills, contrasting the steady increase of other countries.

For example, DAFOH found that Chinese annual transplant numbers increased by 250% between 2000 and 2004, which contrasts with the rates of other countries, ranging from 10-15% during the same time period.

“They have perfected this art form of killing and stealing organs,” Smith told the Caller.

In a 2024 written testimony, researcher Ethan Gutmann estimated that annual victims may number between 25,000 and 50,000, suggesting as many as 175,000 victims even under lower estimates.

Officials-turned-witnesses testified in Smith’s hearings that they personally harvested organs from living patients to maximize quality.

Smith said the motive goes beyond profit, serving the party’s pursuit of practical immortality.

When a member of the CCP’s totalitarian leadership needs an organ, prisoners’ medical records are searched. If a match is found, the individual is killed for the benefit of the party — or, more accurately, the men running it, Smith said.

Smith cited a September hot-mic exchange between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping discussing harvesting in this manner.

“Earlier, people rarely lived to 70, but these days at 70 you are still a child,” Xi said through a translator, according to The Epoch Times.

“As biotechnology advances, human organs can be continuously transplanted, allowing us to become younger and younger, perhaps even achieve immortality,” Putin reportedly replied.

Smith called the practice “murder masquerading as medicine.”

After decades of rapid harvesting, Smith said healthy Falun Gong candidates were depleted, forcing the party to expand into “alternative” supply sources, including Uyghur Muslims, Kazakhs, other Central Asians and Christians.

Christians’ health and “pure lives,” Smith said, make them highly valuable “commodities.”

While Christians currently represent a “smaller portion” of victims, Smith warned they could become increasingly targeted as other populations are exhausted, serving as a fresh resource for an “ever-expanding” enterprise.

Religious persecution is routine in China. Smith told the Caller that Beijing licenses clergy, edits holy scriptures, censors online worship, bars minors from religious life and restricts contact with fellow believers abroad, adding that “the end goal is eradication.”

Though most harvesting occurs in China, H.R. 1503 targets the global organ trade, including Western participants in “transplant tourism.”

The U.S. is no exception. Wealthy American patients, Smith said, are willing to pay steep fees to bypass transplant waitlists, funding China’s system in the process.

Smith is not proposing a new approach but expanding a proven one. By attaching organ harvesting to the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000, the same framework used against Ghislaine Maxwell, he aims to signal that the FBI will treat transplant tourists and brokers like sex traffickers.

The goal is to make the risk — up to 20 years in federal prison and a $1 million fine for those prosecuted in the U.S. — so high that U.S. demand collapses.

The bill would also impose asset freezes, sanctions, and travel bans on foreign participants of the underground market.

“Maybe it deters it, and after a few prosecutions, it begins to make a real serious impact,” Smith said. “You start prosecuting people, and at least it will dry up people utilizing this tainted supply chain.”

H.R. 1503 passed the House 406-1 under suspension of the rules, a process reserved for broadly nonpartisan legislation.

The sole dissenting vote came from Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, whom Smith said votes no on almost everything.

As 2025 draws to a close, the bill remains stalled in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Republican Idaho Sen. Jim Risch.

“I appreciate Rep. Smith’s attention to this horrific issue,” a committee spokesperson told the Caller. “Senator Risch remains committed to countering the dreadful practice of organ harvesting and is happy to work with anyone to counter it. However, this particular piece of legislation has not been raised with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

While any member may request consideration, only the chairman controls the agenda. That leaves the responsibility ultimately on Risch to get the bill out of what Smith called the legislative black hole of referred-but-ignored legislation — the same fate as his 2023 effort.

If Gutmann’s estimates are accurate, between 68,000 and 136,000 people have been killed since the 2023 bill reached the committee, with 15,000 to 31,211 victims since the 2025 bill was referred in June. (RELATED: Islamic Extremists Prepare To Slaughter Hundreds On Christmas, Local Intel Warns)

Without action, the Chinese regime and its allies may seek to further expand the practice, and as reserves of Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghur Muslims are depleted, the CCP may turn to massacring even more Christians to maintain profits.

Smith does not expect the bill to end harvesting overnight, but he believes it will shine a “searchlight” into the darkness of tyranny until the “tainted supply chain” dries up.