In April, as the Covid-19 pandemic gripped the planet, we launched one of the year’s biggest stories: Uncle Sam was shipping your money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for dangerous and cruel coronavirus experiments on animals.

Our blockbuster exposé went…well it went…there’s just no other word for it: viral.

Not three weeks after we launched our campaign, we WON! The Trump administration pulled the plug on funding the animal experiments and requested over $300,000 of remaining 2020 taxpayer money be returned.

 But the NIH isn’t the only big spender. So we exposed how the USDA went on an overseas shopping spree in China, purchased dogs and cats from live animal “wet markets,” and force-fed their remains to lab kittens in cannibalism experiments back in the USA!

Think about that for a minute. Dog and cat meat abroad, taxpayer-funded animal testing at home.

Then, we worked with Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) to introduce Delilah’s Law: to prohibit your hard-earned money from ever being wasted at these markets again—the very same markets implicated in the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

WINNING IN WASHINGTON

The 2021 federal spending bill includes many of WCW’s cost-cutting and life-saving measures which take a big bite out of wasteful animal experiments all across the federal government.

hanks to WCW, cutting taxpayer-funded animal experimentation is now a bipartisan issue. In 2020, we earned bipartisan win after bipartisan win for taxpayers and animals in an era when Republicans and Democrats are otherwise at war.

Our best friends and allies from both sides of the aisle are returning to Congress in 2021, to keep helping us fight the War on Waste.

#GIVETHEMBACK

We made the FDA enact its first-ever, agency-wide retirement policy allowing dogs, cats, primates, and other lab survivors to be retired after experiments. Check out this great coverage in People and Smithsonian Magazine.

THIS IS A BFD. Taxpayers aren’t usually allowed to adopt government lab survivors, even though we “bought them.” Lazy bureaucrats kill them, instead of adopting them out or retiring them sanctuaries.

WCW already made the NIH and the VA commit to their first-ever retirement policies.

Next step? Pass Violet’s Law (aka the AFTER Act) to make adoption an option across the entire federal government! We paid for the animals abused in government labs… now let’s make Uncle Sam #GiveThemBack!

ENDING GOVERNMENT MONKEY BUSINESS

WCW’s successful lawsuit first exposed the NIH’s “fear factory”—where over $50 million of tax money has been wasted to give primates brain damage and scare them with fake snakes and toy spiders.

hen we passed House legislation ordering the agency to provide a plan to reduce primate experiments by 2025.

And we got legislation signed into law calling for an independent review of ALL of the NIH’s intramural primate testing by the National Academy of Sciences. THIS IS ALSO A BFD. When the NAS reviewed the NIH’s chimpanzee experiments, it deemed most of them to be wasteful and unnecessary, ultimately prompting the end of all taxpayer-funded chimp testing.

Painful tests on monkeys are going up almost everywhere in the USA. But WCW held the line on intramural testing. In one of the few bright spots for primates, WCW blocked greedy white coats from expanding the NIH’s in-house testing and got Congress to renew its demands that the VA and FDA reduce experiments and retire survivors.

DEFUNDING DOG LABS

We’ve already cut federal dog experiments to the lowest point ever.

Now we’re ending the VA’s remaining dog labs, like the one in Richmond where white coats feed puppies ice cream before torturing and killing them, and the St. Louis lab we sued.

The Washington Post carried this HUGE story about the NAS report online and in its print edition.

 

WCW—and the 127 bipartisan cosponsors of the PUPPERS Act—aren’t the only ones saying this waste has to go.

Our investigations also prompted the VA Inspector General to determine that the VA illegally spent nearly $400,000 of taxpayers’ money to abuse dogs in experiments.

We also prompted the historic NAS report which found most VA dog testing is unnecessary.

SEEING SUNSHINE

☀️ Sunshine is the best disinfectant. It’s a key weapon in the War on Waste.

Better government transparency makes it easier to find, expose, and defund animal experiments.

The Dept. of Justice wastes our money to stab, shoot, burn, and dismember live animals… and they don’t want you to know about it. So we’ve filed a lawsuit to compel them to provide records relating to such “live tissue training” exercises.

☀️ We saw major victories on that front in 2020:

• Got a huge spending disclosure requirement in the Dept. of Defense’s (DOD) funding bill. We’re now working to pass the Cost Act to get price tags on animal experiments across the whole government!
• Secured an oversight panel and public website reporting how COVID-19 stimulus funds are spent.
• Sued the pants off government labs for violating federal transparency laws and hiding the details of deadly puppy experiments, monkey lab videos, sick cat de-braining experiments, cruel “live tissue training” exercises, and more.
• Worked with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) to release his 2020 Festivus Report, exposing boondoggles like lizards on a treadmill, alcoholic rats, and bobcat urine experiments.
• Secured language in the 2021 federal spending bill directing government labs to develop new metrics on progress towards ending wasteful experiments.

☀️ Transparency may not on first glance seem the ???? ???? ????-iest topic we work on. But it may be the MOST important.

Heck, even if you’re PRO-animal testing, you probably agree: taxpayers have a right to know who’s paying the bills … and who’s cashing the checks!

DUMPING EPA’S TOXIC WASTE

Holy ????, do we love this win: Following an 18-month WCW campaign to expose and end the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) toxicity tests on animals, the agency announced the most comprehensive plan in U.S. government history to completely end animal testing.

L-R: EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler accepts the Greenbaum Policy Pioneer Award from WCW adviser Louise Linton and VP Justin Goodman at EPA headquarters on October 14, 2020.

WCW is the ONLY organization that passed legislation directing the EPA to cut its in-house animal testing, which wasted millions of dollars and killed tens of thousands of victims annually.

In October, we awarded EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler our first-ever Greenbaum Policy Pioneer Award for his visionary leadership.

Now we’ve set our sights on saving the survivors of the wasteful EPA experiments that Administrator Wheeler is commendably shutting down.

Oh yeah, we also won the American Association of Political Consultants’ prestigious Pollie Award for Public Affairs Campaign of the Year!

“This winning campaign achieved high impact results with few resources and brought unprecedented awareness for the uncharted territory of animal issues that fundamentally changed public opinion and public policy.”

Thank you for making it all possible.

We’re waging a relentless War on Waste… you might even call it a guerrilla war. Don’t forget: our average donation is just $18! But that small amount lets us do BIG things.

Please help us keep up this incredible momentum!