Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin intends to follow through with the first Trump administration‘s plan to end animal testing.
During President Donald Trump’s first administration, then-EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler established the initiative to phase out all animal testing, but the Biden administration reversed the plan.
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“Under President Trump’s first term, EPA signed a directive to prioritize efforts to reduce animal testing and committed to reducing testing on mammals by 30 percent by 2025 and to eliminate it completely by 2035,” EPA spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “The Biden Administration halted progress on these efforts by delaying compliance deadlines. Administrator Zeldin is wholly committed to getting the agency back on track to eliminating animal testing.”
The federal government spends an estimated $20 billion each year on animal testing, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases conducts approximately $6.5 billion of animal testing, according to Justin Goodman, White Coat Waste’s senior vice president of advocacy and public policy.
Many of the tests financed with federal dollars have been flagged by White Coat Waste as cruel. For example, a $5.3 million study was conducted in which scientists forced beagles to ingest cocaine in an effort to study a drug that combats cocaine addiction.
“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 told the Washington Examiner in a February interview.
Zeldin’s efforts to phase out animal testing were praised by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), who has spearheaded congressional efforts to ban the practice.
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“I applaud the commitment of my friend EPA Administrator Zeldin to bring President Trump’s plan back after it was senselessly canceled by the Biden-Harris Administration,” Malliotakis said in a statement. “Reinstating the Trump EPA plan will save tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and spare countless dogs, rabbits and other animals from painful and unnecessary experiments that can be replaced with modern alternatives that are more effective than antiquated animal testing methods.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has faced calls from animal rights advocacy group PETA to eliminate the Food and Drug Administration’s testing on animals.