Following historic White Coat Waste Project (WCW) investigations, advocacy, and lobbying, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has recently disqualified the Wuhan animal lab and all animal labs in Russia from future taxpayer funding. And last year, we successfully worked with Congress to cut NIH funding for gain-of-function and other risky virus experiments in “countries of concern” like Russia and China.

But, as we’ve exposed, many federal agencies aside from the NIH are shipping our tax dollars to cruel, wasteful, and dangerous animal labs overseas.

We’ve been taking them on too, and have a promising development to share:

The U.S. House panel that funds the Pentagon just passed its Fiscal Year 2024 spending bill, and it includes language WCW lobbied for that cuts Department of Defense (DOD) funding to the Wuhan animal lab, and all other labs in China, Russia, and other adversarial nations.

As our Worldwide Waste campaign has documented, at least 32 animal testing labs in Russia and China have received taxpayer funding or have been eligible too in recent years. This bill, if passed by the full U.S. House and signed into law later this year, would disqualify all of them from Pentagon funding.

The bill thankfully also cuts DOD funding for any animal experiments, virus-hunting or other projects in China by the disgraced EcoHealth Alliance (we know how that turned out last time!)

We’re grateful to leadership from two-time WCW Waste Warrior awardee Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA), chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, as well as Reps. Chris Stewart (R-UT) and Dave Joyce (R-OH) who also worked with WCW and requested this important measure.