Sunset Staff Say the Funeral Commission Failed to Adequately Run Texas' Body-Donation Program
A November 2026 Sunset staff report finds serious shortcomings in the Texas Funeral Service Commission's Human Anatomical Donation Program, nearly three years after the Legislature transferred that work to the agency. The findings are staff recommendations, not a commission vote or a new law.
Sunset Advisory Commission staff say the Texas Funeral Service Commission has not adequately set up or run the state's Human Anatomical Donation Program, nearly three years after the Legislature transferred that work to the agency. A staff report dated November 2026, with a file date of Nov. 12, and a four-page executive summary, find "several core regulatory shortcomings at TFSC that raise serious concerns about the long-term stability and effective operation of the agency." The document is a staff report, the first of three Sunset versions. It is not a vote of the Sunset Commission and it is not a new law.
The review is limited in scope. Staff say they could not recommend abolishing TFSC or moving its traditional funeral-licensing work to another agency. The report focuses on the anatomical program. A full Sunset review of TFSC is scheduled for the 2030-31 biennium. Staff say that window gives the agency "limited but sufficient time" to show whether it can stabilize and handle anatomical regulation properly.
From 1907 to 2023, the Anatomical Board of the State of Texas tracked donations to willed body programs and helped supply cadavers for medical education. A 2023 Sunset review found that board could not effectively or objectively oversee whole-body donation. The Legislature then abolished it and, through Senate Bill 2040 of the 88th Legislature, transferred those functions to TFSC and required the agency to regulate non-transplant anatomical donation organizations and anatomical facilities as well. Those entities supply donated bodies and specimens and provide spaces used to train medical personnel, first responders, search-and-rescue teams, forensic professionals, and members of the military. The Legislature, the staff report says, "has clearly expressed a desire for effective oversight and regulation of this activity." The transfer, the same report finds, "has not gone well."
Staff describe TFSC's recent history, before and after the transfer, as "rife with turmoil," including "multiple cycles of mass turnover, especially in leadership positions." Different leaders pursued a wide range of priorities, "few of which involved actually getting the anatomical program up and running." The agency had false starts on rewriting outdated rules, underused the first State Anatomical Advisory Committee, and, by the time this review began, had a program "not much more developed than when the Legislature gave it to TFSC in 2023." The report says TFSC did not adopt rules in a timely way and "even set policy outside of the formal rulemaking process, leaving the agency vulnerable to legal liability." In April 2024, according to the report's timeline, TFSC imposed a moratorium on all out-of-state transfers; a later lawsuit argued that statute did not authorize a "final rule" purporting to ban those transfers. The commission later rescinded the moratorium, and the medical-device company that sued withdrew the case.
The agency also struggled with its older duties. In fiscal year 2025, TFSC resolved 197 funeral-services complaints but took an average of more than 370 days to resolve a complaint and ended the year with 603 complaints still pending. In the same year it received 12 complaints related to the anatomical program and resolved one. One of those anatomical complaints, the report says, concerned "a heavily publicized incident at a single WBP with 2,000 alleged violations." The report's timeline records a 2024 investigation that led to a cease-and-desist over alleged use of unclaimed bodies, alkaline hydrolysis, and lack of record keeping at the University of North Texas, after which the university suspended its willed body program. Staff also cite basic operational failures, including a stalled effort to move the agency off Google Workspace after it did not follow advice to use a Department of Information Resources contractor.
In fiscal year 2025, the agency received about $1.4 million in appropriations, licensed more than 5,000 individuals and more than 1,600 funeral-industry facilities, and reported registering 11 willed body programs, five non-transplant anatomical donation organizations, 183 anatomical facilities, and 11 mobile labs, and approving 14 temporary anatomical facilities. It inspected no NADOs that year. The report notes that 13 willed body programs were operating in the state by the time of publication, and that until a few weeks earlier one had been registered as an anatomical facility and another was unregistered.
Staff do not recommend pulling the anatomical program away now. They say transferring it "could undo recent progress that new leadership and staff have made." The report lists later steps, including rules adopted in June 2026, the hiring of a director for the anatomical program in July, an electronic portal and a policies manual in October 2026, and more than 1,300 approved anatomical-specimen transfers in fiscal year 2026. The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation has, since May 1, 2026, loaned TFSC a part-time attorney at no cost to help clear the funeral-enforcement backlog. Staff recommend that the Legislature require a paid interagency contract expanding that help to the anatomical program; change the commission's membership and the agency's name to reflect both of its jobs; replace a private accreditation requirement that the Association for Advancing Tissue and Biologics is winding down by the end of 2028; and authorize injunctive relief for anatomical violations. Fiscal costs, the report says, cannot be estimated until the agency implements the changes.
People who donate a body, or who bury their dead through a licensed funeral home, are entitled to an agency that can write rules, answer the phone, and close a complaint in less than a year. Staff have described what they found and what they recommend. The Sunset Commission still has to decide what to send the Legislature, and TFSC still has to prove it can finish the job it was given in 2023. "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them" (Matthew 7:12). That duty does not end when a body is donated for teaching or research.
