• A new WCW investigation has confirmed that the Department of Veterans Affairs canceled plans to waste $124K to fatten up monkeys in order to induce an eye disorder and then kill and dissect them.
• The Charleston VA quietly canceled the wasteful project after WCW got Congress to enact legislation restricting VA spending on primate testing.
• Congress just enacted historic WCW-backed bipartisan legislation directing the VA to eliminate all primate testing by 2026.
• No other animal protection organization has shut down a government primate laboratory in nearly a decade.

Following White Coat Waste Project’s (WCW) years of investigations, advocacy, and lobbying, Congress just enacted historic bipartisan legislation directing the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to eliminate all primate (and dog and cat) testing by 2026.

For more than five years, we’ve been working to find, expose, and defund the VA’s monkey business. We previously shut down the VA’s $7 million angel dust experiments on monkeys and its $9 million spine-severing tests on primates and convinced Congress to enact restrictions on VA spending for cruel primate tests every year since 2020.

 

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Now, we’ve discovered that our efforts had a bigger impact than we knew and stopped at least one wasteful and inhumane primate experiment before it even started. 

As first reported by World Animal News, documents obtained by WCW via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that in June 2020, soon after the WCW-backed spending restrictions were first put into place, white coats at the VA’s Charleston, South Carolina facility issued a $124,105 contract for primate experiments at the taxpayer-funded Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), which has the dubious distinction of being one of the nation’s largest primate labs. 

The project was slated to run from June 2020 to June 2023. According to documents we obtained through FOIA, in the experiments, four monkeys would be “leased” by the VA from OHSU and “exposed to a high-fat diet” to accelerate “signs of age-related macular degeneration” and test treatments. The monkeys would then be killed and dissected. 

The Charleston VA–which is housed in the Congressional district represented by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), who has been leading efforts to defund VA primate testing–sent $76,850 of taxpayers’ money to OHSU in June 2020 for these wasteful primate experiments. However, in May 2021, $63,456 of that was refunded to the VA, and no other funds were allocated for the project. 

Now, in a recent email to WCW in response to a records request, OHSU confirmed that “this project was cancelled.” 

The spending restrictions that were enacted in 2020 by Congress following our efforts stopped this wasteful primate test in its tracks. The project didn’t pass muster and never received the mandated approval from the Secretary of the VA. 

We’re proud of this victory against the VA’s wasteful monkey business and our success at killing this cruel project in the crib.  

The solution to getting the government out of the primate testing business is simple: