Uncle Sam wastes over $20 billion a year on inhumane and ineffective animal tests. During his first term, President Donald Trump’s administration made historic progress to cut wasteful animal tests exposed by White Coat Waste, including defunding the Wuhan lab that likely caused COVID and shutting down dog and cat labs.
Our plan to Make America Greater for Animals🇺🇸
1️⃣Defund dog & cat labs
2️⃣Defund Chinese animal labs
3️⃣Reinstate Trump EPA animal test phaseout
4️⃣Abolish Fauci’s animal labsThanks @RepNancyMace @RepNicole @RepMTG @LaraLeaTrump @RepLuna @RepGosar @SenRandPaul for A+ leadership! pic.twitter.com/Am0gi9bCtg
— White Coat Waste Project (@WhiteCoatWaste) January 14, 2025
On January 20, Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States and with many WCW supporters filling key roles for Trump 2.0, we’re optimistic that slashing spending on cruel and inefficient animal testing will be on the agenda once again. The newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy has already targeted some of the waste exposed by WCW.
To guide these efforts, we’ve provided the incoming Trump Administration with a simple four-point 100–day plan that would cut billions in wasteful government spending annually and Make America Greater for Animals.
1. DEFUND DOG AND CAT LABS
President Trump’s first administration shut down the government’s largest cat lab and cut dog testing at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Unfortunately, our investigations have uncovered how cruel and wasteful taxpayer-funded tests on dogs and cats that Dr. Fauci and other bureaucrats at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Pentagon funded are ongoing at labs all around the U.S., China, and elsewhere.
DOGE has highlighted some of the wasteful animal testing programs we exposed including the NIH’s ongoing $5 million cocaine tests on beagles, its $770,000 treadmill experiments on zombified cats in a Russian lab (that we shut down!), and over $1.5 million its squandering to spin kittens around for motion sickness experiments. Senator Rand Paul also featured cruel NIH and Pentagon cat tests exposed by WCW in his newest Festivus waste report.
We estimate that taxpayers have forked over more than $4 billion over the past decade for wasteful experiments on dogs and cats. Stop the madness!
2. CUT OFF CHINA’S ANIMAL LABS
Donald Trump personally cut Fauci’s funding to the Wuhan animal lab a few days after WCW exposed it. But, we’ve documented how dozens of other animal testing laboratories in China are still being funded by the NIH. Most recently, we exposed how the NIH paid a lab in China over $2 million to cruelly test experimental drugs on puppies and other animals.
Another WCW investigation unearthed how the USDA is currently collaborating with Wuhan lab experimenters on a dangerous and inhumane $1 million bird flu gain-of-function project. The Department of Defense has been funding dangerous virus labs in China, too.
Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to fund shady animal labs in adversarial nations!
3. RESTORE TRUMP’S EPA ANIMAL TESTING PHASEOUT PLAN
In 2019, WCW worked with Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency chief Andrew Wheeler (now a WCW volunteer adviser) to roll out a landmark plan to phase out its wasteful and costly tests on dogs and all other mammals by 2035. No other federal agency had ever set a timeline for ending animal testing. It was a BFD.
Unfortunately, within months of taking office, the Biden EPA eliminated the plan to end animal tests and retire rabbits. Now, the agency is wasting millions to make animals obese and force them to inhale truck exhaust, wildfire smoke, and firearm emissions, and making companies poison puppies with pesticides. The EPA’s main animal testing lab has an annual budget of over $100 million.
Time to run it back!
4. ABOLISH NIAID AND FAUCI’S ANIMAL LABS
With a $6.5 billion annual taxpayer-funded budget, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—formerly run by Dr. Fauci—is behind some of the most horrendous animal testing in the entire government.
We all know about NIAID’s reckless funding for gain-of-function in Wuhan that likely caused COVID and how Fauci and his colleagues lied about and covered up what really happened. That alone is disqualifying.
Right now, NIAID is also wasting billions on disturbing animal tests at home and abroad, including maximum pain tick bite experiments on puppies, creating transgender animals, building a dangerous new U.S. bat virus lab, implanting human fetal body parts into lab animals, COVID infection experiments on cats, and confining thousands of primates on Monkey Island for deadly virus experiments.
There’s no salvaging this broken agency.
👏 Yes, @LaraLeaTrump!
“All American taxpayers want to know if our taxpayer dollars are actually going to fund things that matter, not these crazy experiments on animals that have no business as part of our federal government”
Stop the money. Stop the madness! pic.twitter.com/tYBMr8vgAf
— White Coat Waste Project (@WhiteCoatWaste) December 30, 2024
We’re proud to partner with WCW allies in Congress to make this wish list come true. So far, our plan has been endorsed by Senate DOGE Chair Joni Ernst (R-IA), Reps. Nancy Mace (R-SC), Greg Steube (R-FL), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), and former Trump EPA chief Andrew Wheeler.
The solution to the $20 billion government animal testing problem is simple: