The National Institutes of Health has shoveled more than $225 million in taxpayer money into new dog and cat experiments since February 2025, openly defying Trump administration directives to shift federal research toward modern alternatives — and nobody at the agency has been held accountable.
A White Coat Waste investigation released this week documented the full scope of the spending: new grants, supplemental discretionary awards, and project extensions that keep taxpayer-funded labs running regardless of what the White House wants. By June, the watchdog group had identified $150 million. By early September, the figure had jumped 50 percent to $225 million — outpacing NIH's own highly publicized $150 million investment in non-animal research methods by $75 million.
Nearly 44 percent of the identified spending, more than $98 million, went straight to pharmaceutical companies conducting dog tests. Another $11.7 million supported invasive cat experiments.
The specific grants read like horror scripts. Up to $2.4 million went to the University of Minnesota for experiments on 60 kittens as young as two months old — drilling holes in their skulls, injecting viruses into their brains, inducing strokes, and killing them. The University of Wisconsin-Madison collected $439,016 to maintain a colony breeding nearly 300 kittens with glaucoma, some killed before they are one day old so their eyes can be dissected.
Meanwhile, other agencies have proven they can act when they choose. The Navy became the first federal agency to ban all dog and cat testing in May 2025, canceling a $10 million contract for constipation, incontinence, and erectile dysfunction experiments on cats. The VA closed its remaining primate studies ahead of schedule, ended cat experiments entirely, and slashed dog use. The EPA reinstated Trump-era goals to cut mammal testing 30 percent by 2025 and eliminate it by 2035. The FDA announced a phase-out of animal testing requirements. Even NIH itself shuttered its last in-house beagle laboratory on the Bethesda campus in May, ending a septic-shock program that had killed more than 2,100 beagles over four decades.
Congress has moved too. Trump signed the 2026 NDAA containing the first-ever congressional prohibition on Defense Department painful research using cats and dogs. Lawmakers cut a joint NIH-DOD contract paying for experimental drug tests on 300 beagles a week in a Chinese laboratory.
So the White House can block money when it wants to. The Interior Department just disapproved more than 130 National Park Service partnership agreements worth $25 million, killing projects for fire preparedness, hantavirus removal, and prehistoric site protection that had already secured congressional appropriations. Interior spokesperson Aubrie Spady said the department blocked agreements with groups "actively working against the best interests of the American people and the priorities of this administration."
Yet at NIH, the grant spigot stays wide open. No bureaucrats have been named. No grants have been clawed back. The administrative state doesn't need permission — it just needs inertia.
The question isn't whether NIH can stop funding these experiments. Other agencies already proved it can be done. The question is who at NIH is choosing not to — and why they still have jobs.
