• White Coat Waste’s (WCW) new Kittengate investigation series has uncovered that National Institutes of Health-funded (NIH) experimenters plan to abuse 60 kittens in a deadly lab at the University of Minnesota (UMN).  
• Documents WCW obtained through state and federal open records requests reveal that kittens as young as two months old will have holes drilled into their skulls and viruses injected directly into their brains. The tiny kittens will also have strokes intentionally induced before being killed. 
• The UMN laboratory has an in-house colony that breeds kittens just to be tortured in taxpayer-funded experiments.
• The NIH grant funding these experiments began in August 2025, and is set to receive $2.4 million in taxpayer funding through April 2030.
• While NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and his deputy Nicole Kleinstreuer claim the agency’s cat tests “predate” them and that they’re working to “phase out” testing on pets, they continue to approve new multimillion-dollar grants for invasive, lethal kitten experiments like these. 
• WCW is leading the charge to defund these experiments and hold Bhattacharya and his ‘animal testing czar’ Kleinstreuer accountable for authorizing kitten torture after promising to end it. 

Last month, President Donald Trump enacted historic White Coat Waste-backed legislation cutting funding for the Pentagon’s painful experiments on dogs and cats.

The $48 billion National Institutes of Health (NIH) is another story. White Coat Waste’s (WCW) new Kittengate investigation has exposed how, under Director Jay Bhattacharya and ‘animal testing czar’ Nicole Kleinstreuer, NIH is still wasting your tax dollars on new experiments that inflict suffering on defenseless cats, despite claiming last summer that the agency’s dog and cat tests “predate” them and that they’re “working tirelessly” to “phase out” pet testing.

As first reported by The Guardian, we’ve secured receipts for new, grisly NIH-funded experiments on kittens at the University of Minnesota (UMN) and other U.S. laboratories. Taxpayers and Congress are angry. 

Thanks to my pushback, @DeptVetAffairs has completely ended cat testing, proving it can be done. Cats and dogs are family, and the federal government should not be using taxpayer dollars to harm them in unnecessary research.https://t.co/OTCGCnczXV

— Dina Titus (@repdinatitus) December 3, 2025

WCW has uncovered how the NIH doled out a brand-new grant that’s paying UMN experimenters to breed kittens and abuse 60 of them in deadly brain imaging and stroke experiments. 

Documents WCW obtained through state and federal open records requests reveal that these UMN experiments were approved and funded by the NIH in August 2025, and are set to receive $2.4 million in taxpayer funding through April 2030. 

At UMN, kittens are subjected to craniotomies, where experimenters secure their heads, drill into their skulls, and inject viruses directly into their brains. 

Two to four weeks later, the kittens undergo imaging to study brain activity while paralyzed with a drug that previously caused fatal complications in other cats at UMN.

Twelve of the kittens in the current project also have small strokes intentionally induced. 

Once they’ve undergone these grueling tests, all cats are killed by experimenters. 

Even worse, this project is led by a faculty member who has been conducting deadly cat experiments since at least 1996. He established his own experimental cat breeding colony because commercial vendors were “unreliable and expensive.” 

In September 2021, a federal inspection reported a serious incident at UMN’s lab in which a cat was given a paralytic agent at 4.5 times the intended dose, resulting in airway failure and death.  

The federal inspectors determined that the death stemmed from UMN’s lack of “proficiency to administer paralytics correctly.” 

While establishment animal rights groups applaud the NIH for its empty promises to end animal testing, WCW continues to expose how the agency is betraying pets and taxpayers. Unlike the NIH, WCW is working tirelessly to shut down every single NIH-funded cat torture chamber. 

For years, WCW has been leading the fight to expose and defund the NIH’s feline torture, including working with Congress to pass the bipartisan Preventing Animal Abuse and Waste Act.

Last year, we stopped an NIH-funded lab at the University of California-Davis from breeding kittens and force-feeding them diseased mouse brains. Thirty cats, including Mochi and Marigold, were saved because of WCW’s investigation. 

Other agencies under President Trump—the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Navy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—have worked with WCW to cut animal testing programs while the NIH clings to cruelty. 

It’s time for the Trump Administration to rein in the most wasteful government agency of them all.