Six-month-old Beagle puppies are put in jackets that inject them with cocaine and meth, causing them to vomit and foam at the mouth, as part of a drug testing study by the National Institutes of Health that has been under congressional scrutiny for years.
Former President Joe Biden’s administration extended funding for the study, which has received $5.3 million, until March 31, according to documents that White Coat Waste shared with the Washington Examiner. Trials for the study of an unnamed drug meant to treat cocaine addiction began in September 2020 and were scheduled to end in March 2022, costing taxpayers an initial estimated $2.3 million. White Coat Waste discovered that upon the end of trials, these beagle puppies were either euthanized or kept at Charles River Laboratories for further testing trials.
In January 2022, the White Coat Waste project uncovered these experiments, prompting criticism from Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on the Senate floor, a bipartisan letter spearheaded by Reps. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) and Nancy Mace (R-SC) demanding answers, the introduction of a slew of bills such as the Companion Animal Release from Experiments Act, and the rescue of 4,000 beagles from a Virginia breeding facility. The rescue operation garnered international attention, especially after Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, adopted one of the beagles from the facility.
But in spite of all of the negative publicity and efforts by Congress, the NIH study has continued, in addition to other cruel experimentations including conducting invasive gender reassignment surgery on monkeys and rats. The Environmental Protection Agency also uses animals for testing, forcing rats to inhale wildfire smoke.
Now, through the Department of Government Efficiency with Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) as the chairwoman of the Senate DOGE caucus, members of Congress and animal welfare advocates such as White Coat Waste are looking to end inhumane and wasteful animal testing that picked up steam under the Biden administration.
“It is about doggone past time to put bureaucrats in the doghouse for wasting tax dollars on cruel and unscientific experiments on puppies,” Ernst told the Washington Examiner. “My investigations exposed and ultimately shut down Fauci’s pseudoscience that was unnecessary and torturous.”
Anthony Fauci, a chief medical adviser to Biden and former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases until 2022, had been with the NIH for over 40 years.
Fauci has been criticized for NIAID funding Chinese labs that conducted “gain-of-function” research and giving approval for spending millions of taxpayers on animal testing. According to Justin Goodman, White Coat Waste’s senior vice president of advocacy and public policy, the federal government spends an estimated $20 billion each year on animal testing, and the NIAID conducts approximately $6.5 billion of animal testing.
“Anthony Fauci is probably personally responsible for more abuse of lab animals than any other single person in human history,” Goodman said. “He wasn’t just a paper pusher. Fauci was personally conducting experiments on animals until the day he left the NIH.”
White Coat Waste and Ernst have adopted a four-point plan to phase out cruel animal testing, which includes cutting funds for dog and cat testing, abolishing the NIAID, ending taxpayer funding of Chinese labs, and restoring the Trump administration’s EPA animal testing phase-out plan.
Goodman shared that the DOGE would play an important role in fleshing out exactly how many taxpayer dollars are being spent on research by the NIH and other government agencies and how.
“Taxpayers and Congress have a right to know how these federal agencies are spending our money, and we do need better reporting,” Goodman told the Washington Examiner. “There needs to be annual reports about how these agencies are spending our money, instead of dysfunctional government databases that you need a Ph.D to operate.”
The first Trump administration sought to end cruel and wasteful animal testing. Andrew Wheeler, the former head of the EPA, made a plan to completely phase out animal testing by 2035. While Biden’s appointee for EPA administrator said during his confirmation hearing that he would continue the Trump administration’s effort, he reversed course just months later.
“The Biden EPA completely canceled the plan put in place by the Trump administration to end animal testing at the EPA, and they started funding wasteful experiments like forcing animals to breathe handgun and rifle smoke for gun control experiments, fattening animals up with high cholesterol diets to make them obese, and force them to breathe wildfire smoke and all kinds of other stupid and wasteful experiments,” Goodman said.
Under the Biden administration, Goodman said White Coat Waste had to play defense against federal agencies’ efforts to continue animal testing.
“Under Trump, we were able to end dog and cat testing at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Joe Biden’s VA secretary, Dennis McDonough, was actually personally signed off on restarting cat testing at the VA,” Goodman said. “Fortunately, we were able to intercept that plan and get them to cancel it before it went through.”
The VA has until 2026 to completely phase out all animal testing.
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Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) has also played a key role in advocating the federal government to end cruel and wasteful animal testing.
“We have successfully helped end many unnecessary experiments already, but Congress must work with President Trump to end all horrific and antiquated experiments and replace them with artificial intelligence and modern technologies,” Malliotakis said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.