Make new friends, but keep the old…so we can work our tails off together to 🛑  the government from spending YOUR money on cruel & wasteful taxpayer-funded animal experiments!

With the 2020 election wrapped up, we are thrilled that White Coat Waste Project’s best friends and allies in Congress are sticking around on Capitol Hill to keep helping us cut taxpayer-funded animal testing.

These include Democrats and Republicans—our Waste Warriors live on both sides of the aisle. Stopping the government from squandering your money on cruel animal tests isn’t a partisan issue! 

These Waste Warriors were re-elected to continue fighting with WCW against wasteful taxpayer-funded animal testing all across the government.

CUTTING FDA RED TAPE

Do you think the Food and Drug Administration should obstruct medical innovation and cost drug companies billions of dollars by forcing them to torture and kill puppies in slow, unnecessary, expensive, and misleading tests? No, neither do we! That’s why we launched our Cut FDA Red Tape coalition this year.

Waste Warriors Reps. Brendan Boyle (D-PA), Scott Perry (R-PA), Sanford Bishop (D-GA), Madeliene Dean (D-PA) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) have already shown critical leadership on this urgently needed regulatory reform, and are coming back to Washington to help us get the FDA to abolish its cruel and pointless dog testing mandate.

ENDING WASTEFUL VA PUPPY AND KITTEN TESTS

Reps. Dina Titus (D-VA) and veteran Brian Mast (R-FL) have consistently led Congressional efforts on our campaign to de-fund the Department of Veterans Affairs’ experiments on cats and dogs—including by co-sponsoring the Preventing Unkind and Painful Procedures and Experiments on Respected Species Act. The PUPPERS Act is bipartisan, WCW-led legislation to de-fund “maximum pain” experiments and other cruel and wasteful dog testing at the VA.

Reps. Titus and Mast are also demanding answers about the three VA labs WCW investigators discovered are buying cats at taxpayer expense, injecting fake stool up their anuses, severing their spinal cords, and removing their brains… at a cost of more than $11.1 million.

These powerful Waste Warriors are returning to Congress to help us put an end to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ shameful, wrong, secretive, and even illegal taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs and cats.

LAB ANIMAL RETIREMENT

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) with Delilah, a cat he worked with WCW to rescue from the now-shuttered USDA kitten slaughterhouse lab

Tens of thousands of animals are killed every year because most government agencies do not yet have policies allowing their retirement to rescues or sanctuaries. The Animal Freedom from Testing, Experimentation and Research (AFTER) Act—which WCW is calling Violet’s Law after the rescued ex-lab dog who inspired it—would change that.

This important bipartisan bill was introduced by Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Gary Peters (D-MI), and Reps. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) and Jackie Walorski (R-IA), who we worked with on Violet’s Law’s introduction, and will again be working closely with this coming term. 

Violet’s Law requires that all federal agencies have policies allowing for the retirement of animals after experiments end in government labs. We paid for these animals, and our returning Waste Warriors are fighting right there with us to make sure we get a say in their fates!

DEFUNDING WET MARKET SPENDING SPREES

Delilah’s Law would stop the federal government from spending a single cent of your tax dollars ever again to buy cats and dogs for slaughter at China’s wet markets that are linked to the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Waste Warriors Sens. Joni Ernst (R-IA) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) cosponsored the WCW-backed bill in the last Congressional session, and will be back in 2021 to help us get the bill passed into law. (They may be joined by fellow cosponsor Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), depending on the results of Georgia’s upcoming special election.)

WASTEFUL SPENDING TRANSPARENCY

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) took action after a troubling federal audit—prompted by a White Coat Waste Project investigation—found that federal agencies are not enforcing a law requiring taxpayer-funded animal experimenters and other grant recipients to publicly disclose how much they spend.

Sen. Ernst introduced the WCW-backed Cost Openness and Spending Transparency (COST) Act to strengthen this law by extending it to all agencies and imposing penalties—including withholding funds—on grantees that don’t comply. This coming session, we will continue working together to make sure this critical and common-sense transparency measure is enacted into law!

How much money did the DoD spend getting animals addicted to cocaine or forcing pigs to run on treadmills? We don’t know, and that’s a problem. I’m working to increase transparency on Washington’s culture of waste and #MakeEmSqueal.https://t.co/HBPRocqwEo

— Joni Ernst (@joniernst) June 18, 2020

CUTTING GOVERNMENT MONKEY BUSINESS

Reps. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Fred Upton (R-MI) have been some of the leading voices in Congress pressing the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration to cut cruel and wasteful primate testing.

Reps. Roybal-Allard and Gaetz are also among those taking action to end all taxpayer-funded primate testing at the FDA, and helped us convince the FDA to enact an agency-wide lab animal retirement policy so more animals can see the light of day after being abused in government experiments.

In the coming Congress, we will work with these Waste Warriors cut funding for all painful primate testing at the FDA and other federal agencies and to retire lab survivors to sanctuaries.

This opinion piece in @TheHill discusses my new Appropriations language that urges NIH to be more accountable and transparent in phasing out cruel and unnecessary primate testing, and replacing it with modern research alternatives. @AppropsDems https://t.co/cPmDcsKZ5W

— Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (@RepRoybalAllard) May 17, 2019

DEFUNDING DOJ “LIVE TISSUE TRAINING”

House Judiciary Committee member Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Vice Chair of the DOJ’s funding panel Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-PA) are returning to Congress to help us stop the Department of Justice from spending taxpayer dollars to stab, shoot, burn, and dismember live animals for “live tissue training” exercises—for which pigs, goats, and sometimes even dogs are purposely and violently inflicted with traumatic injuries for cruel and wasteful medical training exercises. 

We and they will continue pressing to defund this sick and wildly unpopular misuse of taxpayer dollars, in the coming Congress.

EPA ANIMAL TESTS

Reps. Steve Cohen (D-TN), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Ken Calvert (R-CA) are the superhero lawmakers who helped WCW end taxpayer-funded animal testing at the Environmental Protection Agency, becoming the first agency ever to set a benchmark and timeline for the complete phase-out of taxpayer-funded animal testing.

But that’s not the end. Now WCW is enlisting these Waste Warriors’ help fighting for the survivors of the wasteful experiments that the agency is commendably shutting down.

So there we are! There’s a lot to look forward to in 2021! And we absolutely can’t wait to go full throttle with our tireless team of returning Waste Warriors to stop the government from wasting your money on taxpayer-funded animal experiments.