For years, White Coat Waste Project (WCW) has been leading efforts to find, expose and defund Uncle Sam’s wasteful spending in adversarial nations like China and Russia with remarkable success. But, as we’ve exposed, little-known reporting loopholes are still allowing secretive and scary spending overseas with no transparency.
As reported by the Epoch Times, Fox News, Daily Caller, Daily Mail, and others, a new WCW-backed federal bill introduced by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) called the TRACKS Act (S. 1775/H.R. 3766) aims to fix that.
In 2019, our blockbuster investigation uncovered how government white coats bought cat and dog meat at China’s wet markets, flew it back to the U.S. in their carry-on luggage, and then force-fed the meat to kittens in disturbing $22 million cannibalism experiments that we subsequently shut down.
In 2020, we made headlines—and history—by first exposing how the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal agencies indirectly funneled tax dollars to the Wuhan animal lab for dangerous gain-of-function experiments on bats and humanized mice that experts believe caused COVID.
At that time, we also documented how NIH sent money to the Wuhan lab for taxpayer-funded experiments in which animals were deprived of water, restrained, electroshocked, and deliberately scared with loud noises.
The NIH also indirectly shipped another $216,000 to the Wuhan lab for invasive brain experiments on mice.
In 2021, our Worldwide Waste investigation documented how over 30 animal testing laboratories in China and Russia—and hundreds of other foreign animal labs—were receiving hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money each year for cruel and wasteful animal experiments with essentially no oversight.
And last year, we uncovered how the NIH indirectly shipped $770,000 to a Kremlin-linked Russian animal lab for experiments that crippled cats and forced them to talk on treadmills.
Through our investigations, advocacy, and lobbying efforts, we’ve recently cut off funding for the Wuhan animal lab and all animal labs in Russia!
But, over two dozen other animal labs in China are still eligible for tax money, and we can’t stop what we can’t see.
We’re currently suing the NIH over its illegal loophole that completely exempts foreign labs from vital oversight required in U.S. animal labs.
The NIH also inexplicably does not require public reporting of certain pass-through funding for foreign labs and it doesn’t report any funding for foreign labs that’s less than $30,000.
This kind of non-transparent indirect funding for foreign enemies’ labs is deadly for animals and dangerous for taxpayers.
We applaud Sen. Ernst and Rep. Gallagher for introducing the Tracking Receipts to Adversarial Countries for Knowledge of Spending (TRACKS) Act to require public reporting of ALL taxpayer money spent in a “foreign country of concern” which includes Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.
After our Worldwide Waste investigation and what happened in Wuhan, it’s even more important for taxpayers to know how their money is being spent overseas!