In a major win for taxpayers and pet owners, Donald Trump’s Department of Defense (DOD) is Making America Greater for Animals by flushing multimillion-dollar cat constipation experiments—and other disturbing tests on pets in the US and China—thanks to a campaign led by White Coat Waste (WCW).
Last week, during testimony at a Senate hearing on the Pentagon budget, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked to provide an example of wasteful spending he uncovered at his agency. His shocking response went viral: “We’re talking about some stuff I shouldn’t say in public, you know, marbles in the rear ends of cats, tens of millions of dollars.” Hegseth said this cat experiment was a “boondoggle” and that he was “proud to get rid of it.”
WCW is grateful to Hegseth for his leadership, and we’re also proud to be the only group to uncover, investigate, and directly target these disturbing $10-million-plus DOD-funded cat experiments and bring them to the Secretary’s attention for action.
In response to Hegseth’s comments, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) posted on X, “Thank you to @SecDef for highlighting the wasteful spending I exposed in last year’s Festivus Report. This type of taxpayer-funded ‘research’ is not only wasteful—it’s inhumane. Grateful to our friends at @WhiteCoatWaste for continuing to bring this to light.”
It’s been a long road, but WCW built an unprecedented, strange-bedfellows coalition and led the only campaign this century to specifically terminate the Pentagon’s dog and cat experiments—government abuse that liberal legacy animal groups ignored for decades.
WCW started its investigation into these cat experiments in 2022 and in 2023 sued the DOD for records related to the project.
The documents our lawsuit pried free in 2024 showed that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and U.S. Navy were paying a laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh to attach electrodes to cats’ spinal cords, insert inflated condoms into the cats’ colons, and shove marbles into their rectums. Then they forced the cats to defecate the foreign objects via electric shock for constipation experiments and performed related tests on the cats to purportedly study incontinence and erectile dysfunction.
In June 2024, sparked by WCW’s investigation, grassroots firepower, and lobbying, the House passed a bipartisan amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, cutting funding for the Pentagon’s pet abuse. It marked the first-ever vote to defund DOD dog and cat tests. Despite WCW building a diverse coalition with support from Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA), military veterans, and others, the Democrat-led Senate did not include the measure in their version of the bill, and the language didn’t make it to the president’s desk.
But Sen. Rand Paul soldiered on with WCW and included the DOD’s cat constipation experiments as a prime example of government waste in his December 2024 Festivus report, sparking widespread media coverage of the taxpayer-funded kitten killing.
WCW’s top priority for the new Trump Administration has been the defunding of dog and cat labs, and we hit the ground running early this year with support from MAGA allies like Lara Trump and Roger Stone.
In February, I testified at a House Oversight Committee hearing about how Uncle Sam wastes $20 billion a year on animal testing and highlighted the DOD’s cat lab as one of the poster children for this problem. WCW also joined forces with Ben & Jerry’s progressive co-founder. Together, they urged the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut Pentagon waste, including the cat constipation experiments.
WCW’s ongoing investigation then uncovered that the DOD had extended the grant for the cat lab and we launched an effort with Laura Loomer to finally terminate the DOD’s constipation experiments and other kitten and puppy abuse.
Enter Elon Musk, who joined the chorus of disapproval and posted in response to WCW and Loomer’s cat lab investigation that “@DOGE will investigate” and he, “will ask @DOGE to put an end to animal cruelty.”
Two weeks later, an official DOD account on X quoted our story and posted, “This is canceled. All waste at DOD is being removed.”
Fast forward ten days, Trump’s Navy Secretary John Phelan posted a video on X announcing a Navy-wide ban on all dog and cat testing and his spokesperson specifically credited WCW for the policy change. Lawmakers, including Senate DOGE Chair Joni Ernst and Reps. Young Kim (R-CA), Dina Titus (D-NV), and Mike Lawler (R-NY) took a victory lap and cited their work with WCW on the issue.
Days later, the Trump Administration terminated another contract funded by the DOD and National Institutes of Health that funded the cruel drugging of 300 “cute” beagles per week in a Chinese lab—another project first uncovered by WCW and that we’ve been fighting to end with the help of Donald Trump, Jr. and others.
Last week, Sec. Hegseth told Rep. Mace during a House Armed Services hearing that even more cuts to wasteful dog and cat labs uncovered by WCW may be coming.
Thanks to leadership from the Trump Administration and WCW’s investigations and campaigns, all conditions are set for the decommissioning of DOD’s inhumane dog and cat labs.
Justin Goodman is the senior vice president of government watchdog White Coat Waste.