A House committee will hold a hearing this week scrutinizing whether National Institutes of Health animal research amounts to unnecessary animal cruelty, just as the Department of Government Efficiency spotlights such NIH projects as epitomizing government waste.
Witnesses tell the Daily Caller News Foundation they plan to propose a slate of policy solutions, ranging from funding alternative research methods to breaking up and curbing funding to Anthony Fauci’s former institute, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Republican Chair Nancy Mace of South Carolina will lead the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation hearing Thursday titled “Transgender Lab Rats and Poisoned Puppies: Oversight of Taxpayer Funded Animal Cruelty.”
Witness Justin Goodman, senior vice president at the White Coat Waste Project — a government watchdog organization that spotlights waste and cruelty in animal research — said that the hearing will feature the WCWP’s investigations into research underwritten by NIH. Most recently, WCWP revealed a project co-founded by NIH and the Pentagon to test drugs treating neurological disorders on 300 beagles at a Beijing lab.
The group’s investigation unveiled documents from the Chinese biotech firm Pharmaron stating that beagles are “docile, cute, and easy to domesticate,” and thus an ideal research subject.
According to Goodman, NIH animal experimentation is sometimes exported to China to evade regulations on the ethical treatment of animal subjects. Over two dozen animal labs in China receive American taxpayer dollars, some with ties to scientists who also work with the People’s Liberation Army, according to WCWP.
The U.S. government is the world’s foremost underwriter of animal experimentation, accounting for two-thirds of animal research funding worldwide, according to Goodman. The COVID-19 pandemic has raised awareness of the opacity surrounding U.S. government funded labs, and government watchdog reports in recent years have exposed lapses in oversight of biomedical research at the NIH and the Pentagon.
“A staggering lack of oversight has allowed this problem to persist and only get worse,” Goodman said in an interview with the DCNF.
Another recent investigation uncovered government agencies including NIH directed $10 million to hormone therapy and surgery in animals to mimic gender transition.
The ethics of performing biomedical research on animals, especially companion animals that have evolved closely alongside humans like dogs and cats, has been a subject of global debate since the 19th century. For example, the “antivivisection” movement took hold in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, where advocates put an end to medical schools’ practice of sourcing dogs from the city pound.
The debate has historically pit animal welfare advocates against biomedical researchers who argue that suspending animal experimentation would hold back scientific progress and cost human lives.
Proponents of animal research such as the National Association for Biomedical Research argue animal studies are essential because it would be ethically unfeasible to perform the same research in human subjects. Animal research has enabled critical advancements in human health, including Nobel Prize winning discoveries, proponents say.
But as technological alternatives to animal research more aligned to human biology advance, more scientists should move away from it, according to the hearing’s other expected witness, Paul A. Locke, an attorney and scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Locke said that alternatives, including those powered by artificial intelligence, organiods — cell-based in vitro models derived from stem cells — and microphysiological “organs on a chip,” tissues contained in microfluidic chips, have the potential to more closely mirror human biology.
In animal research, sometimes the results prove inapplicable to human physiology, Locke said.
“When do you cross the line from biologically relevant to biologically irrelevant? Researchers don’t focus on that question,” he told the DCNF.
Testing the side effects of small molecule drugs is one area where scientists have not found alternatives to animal testing, but Locke argues that agencies should incentivize the discovery of new methods.
Gerald Parker, a professor of One Health and biosecurity at Texas A&M University and former commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, said that research on companion animals like dogs must have a very compelling purpose, and that the projects flagged by Goodman’s group don’t meet that threshold.
“After spending most of my career in the Army as a military officer and DOD as a senior executive until 2013, I am disturbed to learn that unethical studies using companion animals and with no link to improving operational military medicine were recently funded by DOD and military service funding agencies,” he wrote on X in response to a WCWP investigation. “This must stop.”
“Occasionally, but only occasionally involving companion animals might be justified but it must be a very compelling justification that is independently reviewed and verified to include an ethics review,” Parker told the DCNF. “The White Coat Waste Project has uncovered research that did not meet an ethical or practical scientific justification and should not have been done.”
It remains to be seen whether DOGE, entrepreneur Elon Musk’s effort at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to slash government spending, could put NIH-funded animal research in their crosshairs.
In an X space on Sunday night, both Musk and Republican DOGE Senate Caucus Chair Joni Ernst of Iowa spotlighted animal research as epitomes of government waste.
Musk flagged the collection of novel bat coronaviruses and experimentation on these viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was underwritten both by NIH and the U.S. Agency for International Development, as an emblem of a bureaucracy run amuck.
Ernst spotlighted a National Science Foundation research project involving shrimp running on a treadmill as a prime example of wasted tax dollars.
“These things may be fun, but why are we spending taxpayer dollars on them?” Ernst said.
Goodman also said he plans to make a bold policy proposal: Dissolving the NIAID, which he describes as a “fiefdom” run for nearly four decades by Fauci and whose projects don’t often translate into gains in human health.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a dogged critic of Fauci and NIAID, particularly its funding of gain-of-function research that enhances the pathogenicity or transmissibility of viruses in the lab, has proposed a bill that would split NIAID into subagencies and implement term limits on institute leaders.
“NIAID should not be a jobs program for scientists. These types of animal experiments would never be funded by anyone in the private sector and would never be funded at all if taxpayers were not footing the bill,” Goodman said.
Goodman will also call for the end to the export of cruel animal experiments to China and the reinstatement of a plan to phase out of mammal research at the Environmental Protection Agency by 2035 that began during the first Trump administration, but which was rolled back under the Biden administration.
The hearing will occur at 2 p.m. on Thursday. Among the expected attendees: beagles rescued from animal laboratories.
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