President-elect Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency has elevated the problem of wasteful spending from a think tank white paper to a national cover story. With the national debt at $36 trillion (more than $300,000 per taxpayer), there is an enormous amount of spending to cut.
What better way to start than by cutting the $20 billion the government wastes each year on dead-end experiments that torture dogs, cats, and other animals?
Trump 1.0 was an unprecedented victory against expensive and ineffective animal testing. Here are four simple ways a returning administration and Congress can continue to save millions of animals and stop billions of dollars in reckless spending.
1. Waive funding for painful tests on dogs and cats.
Coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci may have left government, but he and other officials have given the go-ahead for taxpayer-funded testing of dogs and cats in the U.S., China, Canada and elsewhere. It has become clear how cruelly the conditions are being continued at the research institute.
DOGE recently exposed a number of these wasteful programs, including the $5 million the National Institutes of Health wasted on injecting cocaine into beagles and the $770,000 the NIH shipped to the United States. emphasized. Russian laboratory More than $1 million was spent severing a cat's spinal cord and forcing it to run on a treadmill. spin the kitten around For motion sickness experiments.
A national poll in October found that 85% of taxpayers oppose government funding of painful experiments on pets.
However, we detailed in a Congressional briefing last month that there are still more than 60,000 dogs and cats locked up in American laboratories. Please stop it already.
2. Shut down animal testing facilities in China.
The NIH still funds 26 animal testing laboratories in China, some of which have ties to the Chinese military or government. The agency recently paid a Chinese lab more than $2 million to force-feed and inject experimental drugs into puppies and other animals in completely unnecessary experiments.
And while the U.S. intelligence community is concerned about the development and use of biological weapons by China, the Biden-Harris Department of Agriculture is concerned about the $1 million in taxpayer-funded bird flu profits that the Chinese Communist Party-run Wuhan virus Collaborates with the institute's parent organization. The functional project is scheduled to run until 2026.
Any animal research lab in China will no longer be tax-paying, after the Wuhan lab's research caused the coronavirus and the Chinese government's refusal to cooperate with a U.S.-funded investigation into animal testing in Wuhan. should not receive the money.
3. Reinstate President Trump's EPA animal testing phase-out plan.
President Trump's Environmental Protection Agency made history with a strategy to end misleading, expensive and cruel animal testing by 2035 and retire lab animals. This is the first time a federal agency has set a strict and rapid timeline for eliminating animal testing, which is counterproductive and succumbing to new technology. Republicans and Democrats celebrated the move.
But the Biden administration quickly and quietly reversed the phase-out without attempting to implement it, and officials also forced pesticides down puppies' throats and abused other animals in futile experiments. I'm back in the act. Literally retired an elderly rabbit and refused to let it die in its place.
Reinstating President Trump's common-sense plan to abolish animal testing will protect puppies, public health, and people's pockets.
4. Flush Fauci's animal lab.
Want to save billions and tons of animals at once? Take control of Mr. Fauci's broken and rotten National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. This institute is the one that brought us coronavirus and other real-life horror shows.
Mr. Fauci and his team violated the federal gain-in-charge ban, lied to Congress about it, and used private emails to discuss lab leaks and the Beaglegate scandal. He violated the law by circumventing the Freedom of Information Act. The corruption runs deep.
But wait — that's not all. The agency imports bats from Asia for dangerous virus experiments and infects primates with Ebola in high-risk biolabs and engineering facilities. transgender laboratory animals And it sends more tax dollars ($2 billion from 2011 to 2021) to unaccountable overseas animal labs than any other agency.
We have worked together for years to reduce wasteful and inhumane government experimentation on pets and other animals. We're excited to have other like-minded Republicans join us in Washington to get the job done.
For millions of Americans concerned about reducing government spending and protecting animals, now is our time. Please stop the money. Please stop the madness.
Nicole Malliotakis represents New York's 11th Congressional District and co-chairs the Congressional Animal Protection Caucus. Anthony Bellotti is the president and founder of the government watchdog group White Coat Waste Project.
